When someone says to me “Have a Happy Easter”, or even “Have a Merry Christmas”, I often reply with “You’re welcome!”.  Naturally for most people this is met with surprise, confusion, and wondering if I have a hearing problem.  Usually since these are often people like the checkout person at the local supermarket or the guy that makes my lattes at Starbucks we don’t get into why I’m not just returning the pleasantry and moving on with my day.  I leave the person baffled and that’s that.  But there have been times when I’ve been asked “Huh?  What do you mean?”  And in those cases I always take the opportunity to provide a little knowledge and wisdom about the holiday at the time and it’s Pagan origins.

Most people today celebrate Easter as a day for a big meal with family, the chance to eat chocolate in the shape of unsuspecting rabbits, and the opportunity to make their kids look like idiots as they rip apart the yard or house looking for colored eggs in one form or another.  These people know it’s a Christian religious holiday but they celebrate in a secular way and are often unaware of the connections with the holiday and it’s origins.  Then you have the Christians who either know full well what the meaning and origins of the holiday are but ignore it or deny it, or even better, you get those Christians who refuse to acknowledge the customs associated with the holiday because they don’t tie directly into their mythology.  I have the most respect for those Christians out of all these people, to tell you the truth.

The first thing that makes the holiday suspect is the timing.  Easter, the Christian holiday that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ, doesn’t have a fixed date.  Easter always happens on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox.  Maybe Jesus wanted to make sure there was moonlight out to light his way home.  Maybe before the Spring Equinox it was too cold to come out of the cave where his body had been laid.  Why are these dates movable when the dates sound like solid events that should have a definite time of occurrence?  In short, it depends on when the Jewish holiday of Passover occurs.  But there’s a longer explanation.

Original the date was always the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Equinox but in 325 AD the Council of Nicea wanted to set a more fixed calendar for holy dates.  The dates were still tied to lunar events such as full moons and would become known as the Ecclesiastical Lunar Calendar.  The Ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a lunar month and thus changes all the time based on when the full moon took place (so, for example this month the new moon was on April 3rd and 14 days later was April 17th which was the full moon).  In Western Christianity the holiday of Easter is always celebrated on the first Sunday following the Paschal Full Moon (Paschal is derived from the Hebrew “pesach” meaning “Passover”).  Since this is when Passover happens in the Jewish tradition, this is when the Church decided to set the Easter holiday since the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus happened after Passover.

But what of all the other things we see during the holiday?  Bunnies, colored eggs, all the images of newborn chicks, freshly sprouted grasses and flowers?  That would be a combination of Pagan influence and good ol’ Mother Nature coming to the party.

First consider that in the Middle Eastern deserts that were home to Jesus there were probably few lawns that ever needed to be mowed in time for Easter egg hunts or flowers that were springing up to serve as Easter Sunday brunch for the local family of hares living near by.  These are all things that came to the holiday during the Church’s attempts to convert the Pagans of Europe to Christianity.  It was easier to try and adopt the existing customs of a place than completely stamp them out and insist that new traditions be upheld.  So many of the things that, at the time, were not understood by the Church and see as just harmless country customs were kept as part of the spring holiday.

Bunnies, Eggs, and the name of Easter
The tradition of the Easter Bunny is likely tied to a myth connected to the Teutonic Goddess of Spring, Eostre.  Her name is a combination of Germanic words that mean “east” and “aurora” or “shining”.  She is a Goddess of the dawn and Spring and in her myths she brought the arrival of spring warmth and weather to the earth.  It’s said in one of her myths that she was late one year and when she arrived she found a small bird who could no longer fly because his wings had been frozen from the snow.  Feeling guilty but also feeling compassion for the bird, she turned him into a hare and gave him the ability to run at a high speeds so he could outrun hunters.  She also wanted to honor his origin as a bird and gave him the ability to lay eggs in all the colors of the rainbow on one day a year.  However, at one point the hare angered Eostre and she cast him it not the sky where he would reside as the constellation Lepus (The Hare) where he would always be at the feet of Orion (The Hunter).  She did allow him to come back to earth one day a year, on her feast day.  He could lay his eggs on that day but he had to give them away; it’s said that he would lay his eggs around the tall grasses and children attending celebrations that day would find the color eggs as they played.

This is where the idea of the Easter Bunny, the gifting of eggs, and egg hunts may have originated.    As symbols the hare and the egg are signs of fertility and new life, both intimately connected to the events of spring.  The custom of the brightly colored eggs would carry on as people would color the eggs and give the as gifts, symbolically passing on energy of renewal and fertility to those that received the eggs.  Today we still see the Spring Hare, Eostre Bunny, or Easter Bunny come with gifts for children.

These are some of the most prominent elements of today’s holiday of Easter and they have nothing to do with Christianity or the return of Jesus (rising from the dead…doesn’t that make him a zombie?) and are Pagan customs that clearly have such a strong resonance with us that we’ve never been able to let them go.  The symbolism and connections of this day and the Pagan customs of spring go much deeper than we have time to discuss here, but remember, when someone gives you a dyed egg or a chocolate bunny today just say “thanks” and know they’re helping to keep your tradition of celebrating the return of fertility to the earth and the spirit of Eostre alive and well.