Where did Easter traditions come from?

Legends tell of a magical rabbit who lays colorful eggs and spends his days weaving baskets and filling them with candies and treats.

Once a year, he emerges from his warren with his rabbit helpers and hides those eggs and baskets all over the world for children to find come Easter morning.

The story of the Easter bunny, told primarily to kids, is just one interpretation of the Easter holiday. To some, it is a day to celebrate with children and chocolate, to others it’s a time to get outside and garden, and for many, Easter is an important religious day of remembrance.

“Easter is a Christian holiday, one of the more important ones,” said Alexander Troutner, a junior in religious studies. “It essentially celebrates the resurrection of Jesus after his execution under Pontius Pilate on Good Friday.”

The holiday has been celebrated almost since Christianity’s beginnings, he said, and is closely tied to the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Rituals celebrating Christ’s resurrection have evidence going back to the mid-second century, suggesting it had been an established religious holiday at least several generations before then, said Philip Barlow, a religious studies professor in the department of History.

One evidence of the holiday in the past was found in the records of the First Council of Nicaea, a council of Christian bishops that was called together by the Roman Emperor Constantine in AD 325 to unify the Catholic churches and settle religious disputes in the empire, Jones said.

Two rules regarding the celebration of the Easter holiday were ironed out in Nicaea, he said. The first was that Easter would be calculated independently from the Jewish calendar and instead be calculated through their own partially lunar-based calendar.

The other ruling decided by the council was that the time of Easter would be uniformly celebrated by the Christian religion, Barlow said. This second ruling didn’t sustain itself over time, however.

As the holiday evolved, Easter was celebrated with both religious and secular traditions, similar to Christmas, he said.

Today, Easter is celebrated in many different ways: through religious devotion, family suppers, gardening, scavenger hunts, egg dying and more. Traditions have evolved from different practices and cultures as Christianity grew.

“There was a common belief, a pseudo practice in Germany where a rabbit figure would be portrayed as the judge of children during the Easter time to see whether or not they kept their fast,” Troutner said.

If children upheld good Christian values “as good as a child can,” he said, the Easter Bunny would decide whether or not they deserved eggs and chocolate during Easter in a manner similar to the naughty-and-nice list for Christmas.

The act of hard boiling eggs for Easter also originally came from established cultural practices, Troutner said.

“Easter falls at the end of Lent, which is a 40-day fast associated typically with Catholicism orthodoxy wherein in Catholics would often abstain from meat,” he said, “and I know in the Jewish tradition, at least, and early Christianity, eggs were considered meat and so you would abstain from eggs as well.”

One way to preserve the eggs collected during the time of fasting was to hard boil them so they would keep until the end of Lent, he said.

“And so when Easter would come and you could start eating meat again, they would have a huge feast with eggs, particularly in Germany,” he said, “and today among orthodox groups and to add to the celebration of that, they would color the eggs, they would make a big festivity out of it, butcher all of their animals, that sort of thing.”

At the core of the different beliefs and cultural practices, Barlow said, Easter has kept a continuity and “maintained itself in the Christian consciousness as central,” where other religious practices such as sacraments and rituals have shifted.

“There’s a whole category of Christians who may not attend church much, but tend to go to church at least twice a year and that’s Christmas time and Easter time,” he said, “and so that shows us a certain resilience of the importance of it, even to those who don’t go to church much.”

Easter wasn’t always solely a Christian celebration, said Lisa Gabbert, an associate professor of English and the director of the folklore program. Originally, it was a time to celebrate the equinox and the coming of spring.

A lot of holidays were closely tied to the seasons, Gabbert said. Solstices and equinoxes marked important transitions of time for many cultures, particularly for farmers and agriculturalists who were concerned about how long nights and days were.

In a fundamental sense, she said, Easter is really about light and darkness.

“And not in a metaphorical sense in terms of like Christ and the devil, but literally about how much sunlight you’re getting,” she said.

The symbols associated with Easter today, such as eggs and rabbits, have also evolved from the pagan form of the holiday as well as their meanings, she said.

The egg was a symbol of fertility and life, she said. Some would argue that the yolk inside represented the sun as well.

In the Christian interpretation, Barlow said, the egg was dyed red to “symbolize the blood of Christ that was shed at the time of crucifixion” and then cracked to symbolize the empty tomb of Christ.

Over time, eggs were dyed colors other than red and the symbolism representing the blood of Christ was forgotten.

The symbolism for the rabbit in Easter came from German Lutherans, Troutner said, where it was considered a symbol of purity in the European culture.

“Rabbits have also been used in Christian symbolism in the same way that doves have,” he said. “Though not as prolific, often you can find portrayals of the Trinity with a rabbit instead of a dove, say, representing the holy spirit. Things of that nature.”

The rabbit symbolism could also represent the onset of spring and the appearance of animals in the garden, or it could have originated from its connection to the German deity, Eostre, a goddess of associated with dawn and fertility, Gabbert said.

Eostre could also be the source of the name for the holiday, Gabbert said, though there is not conclusive proof to that theory.

Whatever the true origin of the holiday and its traditions, she said, Easter is a time “about coming to life and rebirth,” from both a plant’s perspective and a religious one.

“Whether you are just a gardener, or whether you are a firm believer of the resurrection of Christ, or whether you are just doing it for your kids and you want to to have fluffy chicks and Easter bunnies and eggs,” she said, “those are all variations of celebrating this time of year where things are coming back to life.”

—miranda.lorenc@gmail.com

@miranda_lorenc