Today is Easter, celebrating Jesus’s resurrection — the foundation upon which Christianity was built. It’s obviously one of the most important Christian holy days, and like most special days, it has its traditions, symbols and customs.
Many historians believe that Christians named Easter after Eastre or Eostre, a pagan Anglo-Saxon goddess, in the hopes of encouraging conversion. The early Christians called their Easter celebration “Eosturmonath” after the (Germanic) goddess Eostre. She was recognized as the bringer of springtime and flowers, and after all the celebrations in her honor, the name stuck around for the Christian celebration of the Resurrection.
The early Christians had to link up with something that was relevant and familiar in order to help their new religion get off the ground, so using familiar symbols helped to move their ministry forward and also provided a helpful tool for what they were trying to say. Both rabbits and eggs were pagan symbols of fertility and new life. Over time, eggs gained the representation of Jesus’ emergence from the tomb. In the middle ages, it was forbidden to eat eggs during Lent, so once Easter arrived, the egg shells were painted to celebrate the end of this period and that Christ rose from the dead.
The legend of an egg-laying, candy-giving bunny rabbit was born in Germany and the tradition didn’t arrive in the United States until the first Germans immigrated to America in the 1700s.
Obviously we’re all thinking about Ukraine this year, but while the tradition of dyeing eggs at Easter began as a religious practice, the custom of decorating those eggs comes from a Ukrainian craft dating back thousand of years. The eggs, called pysankas, are created using wax and dyes, a process Ukrainian immigrants brought with them to the United States.
A co-worker of mine used to say that Orthodox Easter was later because then you get stuff cheaper, but Easter, and Orthodox Easter, is meant to be a symbol of hope, renewal and new life — Happy Easter.
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