Easter is a sacred holiday for many, and for many more, it is a time to overindulge in chocolate in the shape of bunnies and eggs. But have you ever paused mid-bunny-ear-bite to consider why you’re eating chocolate shaped like a bunny in the first place? Where did this strange tradition come from and how is it linked to religion?
Well, we’re going to take you down the rabbit hole and tell you the tale of the shaky-at-best origins of how chocolate bunnies and eggs came to be symbols of Easter.
A tale of a saviour, a monk, a goddess and a drugstore owner.
The Saviour
We’ll start here as this is the Easter celebration as we know it. You’ll likely know the story behind the Christian tradition of Easter. If not, in a nutshell, Jesus, the son of God, was crucified on a cross to pay for the sins of all mankind. He died and was put in a tomb but when the tomb was opened three days after the crucifixion, it was empty and Jesus had been resurrected.
This sacrifice and subsequent rebirth of Jesus is arguably the pinnacle of the Christian faith and has led to the idea of being ‘born again’ (when one takes on the faith), amongst other things. The Easter celebration happens over a weekend around the equinox at the start of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, with services on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. In the Southern Hemisphere, it’s the start of autumn, but since the tradition started in the north, we follow suit.
Families celebrate Christ’s resurrection by attending church, and then hiding Easter eggs in the garden or house for the children to find.
The monk
Now let’s move on to an English monk who lived in the 8th C. His name was Bede, also known as the Venerable Bede, and he was a dedicated historian, theologian and chronologist. Thanks to him, we have a big chunk of the recorded history of England and early Christians.
He’s largely responsible for the fact that we use the Anno Domini dating system today. If you’re unfamiliar with this, it’s the way we measure time in terms of before Christ’s birth (BC) and after (AD). We are currently in the year 2022 AD. Bede also helped to popularise Computus, the ancient method for figuring out what dates Easter celebrations should fall on each year.
He did (and continues to) stir up a bit of controversy, though. In one of his writings, he mentions that the ‘Saxon month of Eosturmonath, which corresponds to our month of April, was named after an ancient Saxon goddess ‘Eostre’. This has led to much debate over whether Easter was named and modelled after a pagan spring festival that was assumed to be in honour of this goddess.
About 1000 years later, Jacob Grimm, of the Brothers Grimm who are renowned for fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, threw another spanner in the works. He hypothesised that all spring festivals started out as pagan festivals and assumed that Bede had been correct about the existence of this Germanic goddess Eostre, of which there appears to be no other evidence anywhere. Grimm decided her name in modern German would have been Ostara.
So, people questioned even more whether Easter is the Christianisation of a pagan festival.
According to Britannica (and various other sources), though, it seems not. Easter has been observed since the 2nd C and probably longer and is referred to as Pascha (meaning Passover in Latin) or a form of the word ‘Pascha’ pretty much everywhere in Europe except England, Germany, the German part of Switzerland, and Luxembourg. So, perhaps in English, German and Luxembourgish (a Germanic language), the name was borrowed from the pagan festival or the old Saxon name for the month of April that Bede and Grimm wrote about, but it appears to have been a celebration long before Eostre was ever mentioned.
The goddess
So, that’s all very interesting in a history book kind of way, but what on earth does this have to do with bunnies and eggs?
Well, we’ve established that there may or may not have been a German goddess who may or may not have been revered in pagan festivals back in ye olde days. As we’ve seen, some accounts reckon she was a fictional creation.
Either way, as the story goes, her name was Ostara (or Eostre) and she was the goddess of fertility, renewal and rebirth. Her totem animal was a rabbit that laid multi-coloured eggs. In mythology, rabbits are heavily linked with fertility for obvious reasons… ever heard the term ‘breed like rabbits’?
The connection between the egg and Easter stems from many things. The egg is obviously a symbol of fertility and new life.
Another connection between the egg and Easter is that in the 13th C, early churches would ban eggs over Lent and this is perhaps where the practice of painting eggs came from, as children would decorate the eggs in preparation for when they could eat them again.
Over time, German children began to refer to this bunny that laid eggs as the ‘Osterhase’ or ‘Oschter Haws’ (Easter hare) and by around the 18th C, this tradition had been brought over to the United States via the German immigrants in Pennsylvania (also called the Pennsylvania Dutch). Children would make nests for the bunny to lay its eggs in, which eventually became baskets.
The drugstore owner
Around the late 18th and early 19th C, a few things collided for the next big development in Easter: chocolate.
By this time, children were receiving cardboard, wooden or fabric Easter bunnies, often with removable heads and filled with sweets. The Industrial Revolution was spreading and with it, cocoa and chocolate production became more accessible. Chocolate was changed from a liquid delicacy of the rich to an edible of the common person.
So, you might be thinking, what about this drugstore owner?
Well, the people of the 19th C were industrious in more areas than machinery. Marketing was emerging as a new buzzword. Even drugstore owners were using it. One such man was Robert L. Strohecker who, in 1890, got a 5-foot-tall chocolate bunny made to put at the entrance of his drugstore as an Easter promotion. He hoped that it would attract customers. Little did he know that he would start a never-ending trend.
It should be noted that he was not the first to create a mould of an Easter Bunny and make it out of chocolate. This is apparently a German creation too. Strohecker, however, was the one who made it popular in the land of commercialisation – the USA.
Phew! That was quite the complicated history. If you’ve managed to get through all that, well done! You deserve a chocolate bunny.
Easter treats around the world
These days, there are variations of the Easter Bunny tradition around the world. It’s not always a bunny who delivers the eggs or candies.
In Sweden, they have Easter witches, in France, flying Easter bells, in Norway, Easter chicks, and in Switzerland, the Easter Cuckoo.
Here in Australia, many people prefer the Easter Bilby to the Easter Bunny, seeing as rabbits are considered a bit of a pest and bilby’s look pretty similar, if a bit more mousey.
Different countries have other treats besides chocolate at Easter time too. In one French village, they make a giant omelette; in Switzerland, they make an Easter Swiss roll; in Spain, it’s torrijas (similar to French toast); in Poland, it’s a really pretty cake called Mazurek królewski; and here in Australia (as well as most other Commonwealth countries), hot cross buns abound.
But the most common and beloved treat is, of course, our favourite thing of all time – chocolate!
And if all this Easter Bunny talk has given you a chocolate craving, check out our selection of hand-crafted, gluten- and palm-oil free delicious and decadent chocolate.
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Treat your loved ones and maybe add a treat for yourself this Easter with quality chocolate made with love by Davies. See our full range here.