By WSR
Easter is on Sunday, which means the beloved Easter Bunny will be making an appearance at households across the world.
But how did the Easter Bunny come to be?
There is not an exact answer to this question but multiple widely shared theories.
The first being that rabbits, known for their energetic breeding, have long symbolized fertility. Specifically, in the Pagan festival of Eostre, a bunny represented the goddess of fertility. The Easter Bunny first arrived in the United States from German immigrants in the 1700s, who already had a tradition in which children made nests for the bunny to place eggs in, according to History.com.
Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and eggs have long represented new life.
The tradition of creating nests for eggs eventually expanded to include chocolates and candies, with decorated baskets also replacing the nests.
The History Channel created a video breaking down how the origins of Easter eventually led to its present-day celebration.
About the cartoonist: Bob Eckstein is a writer, illustrator, New York Times bestselling author, New Yorker cartoonist, and world’s leading snowman expert. To see more of his work check out his popular newsletter, The Bob.
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Mythiphus
Nice to know.
Easter is derived from a pagan fertility rite and kids are supposed to put out eggs for the rabbit, a mammal, to lay in the basket.
Makes perfect sense, no? Or, is it, “Makes perfect sense. No.” Like so many other things in life.
It really is a bizarre mashup of traditions and celebrations (not unlike Christmas trees and Santa Claus). Eggs and egg dying, without the rabbits, are part of many Eastern (Greek, Serbian, and other) Orthodox Christian traditions (which follow a different calendar to the western Catholic and Protestant one, so will celebrate in another week.) In countries with cold winters, this is about the time of year, with longer days, when hens start laying again after a winter break. And when there are lambs for a have a celebratory feast.
We owe those Pagans, big time~ for the most fun parts of Christian holidays. They created the “Christmas” tree ~ the pagans brought evergreen branches into their homes at the winter solstice , which evolved into said tree. And now we learn they worshipped a gooddesf of fertility Aestrus, from which we now get the Easter egg and fertile Easter bunny.