Critchley Hall News
What Came First the Rabbit or the Egg?
With a little bit of digging around into the history of Easter you can unearth a few surprises – although it’s a thoroughly Christian festival these days, it turns out that Easter actually predates Christianity and the name itself stems from Eostre, the Saxon goddess of dawn. She arrived in Britain with the Saxons around about the 5th century and they continued celebrating Eostre, spring and fertility on her feast day at the vernal equinox in April.
But this celebration of spring goes much further back into the depths of history. Most civilisations had some sort of festival to mark the rebirth of the year. In fact, we owe the moveable nature of Easter to ancient Egyptian astronomers, who invented the equation that we still use to pinpoint the date of Easter – it’s the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. Simple really!
When Christianity began to spread and Christians celebrated the resurrection of Christ, it coincided with the ancient festival of Eostre, so the early church adopted the name and modern day Easter was born.
What came first the rabbit or the egg?
Many of our Easter traditions are hangovers from Easter’s pre-Christian past – the rabbit and hare were symbols of fertility and have become the Easter bunny. Most notably, the egg was the symbol of new life and it has now become the definitive trademark of Easter in the form of chocolate Easter eggs.
From the earliest of times, painted eggs have been exchanged at Easter, from the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, to the Persians, Chinese and the Saxons – they were all at it! The egg itself (as a gift) has continued to evolve over the centuries from dyed goose eggs, to beautifully decorated papier-mâché eggs in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Fabergé, of course, hit the heights of man-made eggs with his jewel-encrusted works of art. But the most exciting evolution for us happened in Europe in the early 1800s when chocolate Easter eggs first started to appear. However, being made from fairly basic, gritty dark chocolate, they were still worlds away from our modern day Easter eggs. It wasn’t until 1873 that the first mass-produced egg appeared, the Cadbury Easter egg. And we had to wait until 1905 for the first milk chocolate egg to appear.
Who’d have guessed that our love affair with chocolate Easter eggs, Easter baskets and the Easter Bunny had such ancient roots?