What’s the Word: Easter customs have hopped along
Watching kids run around like crazy hunting easter eggs has become one of the traditions of spring. We love to watch them, and they love to hunt them. Still, we all know the celebration of Easter also has great religious significance. Christians celebrate Good Friday as the day Christ died and Easter Sunday as the day of his resurrection.
But some of the other customs have become somewhat obscured over time, so I thought I would be fun to do a bit of research on the origins of some of the terms and icons of the celebration.
Some of the customs come from pre-Christian religions and all are, in one way or another, a “salute to spring,” intended to mark a re-birth and a new growing season. The Easter lily, pristine white, has come to represent the beauty and purity of the holiday.
The word “Easter” itself is named after Eastre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, in whose honor a festival was held every year at the vernal equinox. It seems we have never really gotten too far removed from our hunter-gatherer ancestors since many of our celebrations are basically seasonal, representing some aspect of tending the fields.
Over the centuries, many of these celebrations have been melded into our current religious belief systems, and some have just hung around from earlier times with no real religious significance at all.
Take the Easter Bunny for instance. Today, on Easter Sunday, many children will wake up to baskets of candy left by the Easter Bunny. And legend has it he has also hidden the eggs children may have decorated earlier in the week. Families, neighborhoods and organizations will stage egg hunts and the child with the most eggs, or a special “golden” egg will win prizes.
But who is this “Easter Bunny” really? According to various sources the Easter Bunny is a rabbit spirit who was long ago called the “Easter Hare.” Hares and rabbits, as is well known, are very prolific, more often than not having multiple births so they became synonymous with fertility. The Easter egg hunt custom started because children thought hares laid eggs in the grass. Eggs also have had religious meaning for different cultures over the years. Romans believed all life came from an egg, and even Christians considered eggs as “the seed of life” and so they became a symbol of Christ’s resurrection.
No one is really certain why we decorate and dye eggs for Easter, but in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and Persia the people dyed eggs for spring festivals, and in medieval Europe elaborately decorated eggs were given as gifts.
One interesting aspect of Easter celebrations that is no longer very common, in the south at least, is “egg rolling.” Apparently, in England, Germany and other European countries children played a game where they rolled eggs down a hill on Easter morning. The game was said to represent the rolling away of the rock from Christ’s tomb when he was resurrected.
This custom was brought to the New World by the British and still goes on today. Dolly Madison organized the original egg roll in Washington D.C. at the new Capitol building, something congress was quick to complain about because it was supposedly ruining the Capitol lawn. So in 1880 it was moved to the White House south lawn where it is still held, with Easter Monday being the only day of the year when tourists can wander the White House lawn.
And best of all, it’s the one time of year when politicians might have a good excuse for the egg on their faces.
(Charlie Johnson is news editor of the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].)