Easter

Easter:

Easter is celebrated on the Sunday after the full moon following March 21st

Easter is a “movable feast” that is always held on a Sunday between March 22 and April 25. Why is Easter so late this year? Find out why the date changes every year and how this holiday relates to the first full Moon of spring.

Easter this year happens just one day after April’s full Moon (Saturday, April 16), which is the first full Moon to occur after the ecclesiastical spring equinox (March 21) and is therefore known in the Christian calendar as the “Paschal Full Moon.”

Pretzels used to be associated with Easter

When we think of Easter, chocolate, hot-cross buns and eggs usually spring to mind. But did you know that pretzels are also an Easter snack?

Pretzels are associated with Easter because the twists resemble arms crossing in prayer. From the 1950s, it was tradition for Germans to eat a pretzel and a hard-boiled egg for dinner on Good Friday.

Originally German children looked for hidden pretzels and hard-boiled eggs throughout their parent’s farms. Hiding places such as the straw lofts and barns eventually introduced the tradition of egg hunts. It became a tradition for German children to wear pretzels around their necks on New Year’s for good luck.

The Easter Bunny legend began in Germany

Folk traditions of England and Germany that the figure of the hare is specifically connected to Easter. Accounts from the 1600s in Germany describe children hunting for Easter eggs hidden by the Easter hare, much as in the United States today.

Written accounts from England around the same time also mention the Easter hare, particularly in terms of traditional Easter hare hunts and the eating of hare meat at Easter.

One tradition, known as the “Hare Pie Scramble,” was held at Hallaton, a village in Leicestershire, England. It involved eating a pie made with hare meat and people “scrambling” for a slice. In 1790, the local parson tried to stop the custom due to its pagan associations, but he was unsuccessful, and the custom continues in that village until this day.

The act of painting eggs originates from a Ukrainian tradition

For countless generations, Ukrainians have been decorating eggs as a calling out to the Gods and Goddesses of health and fertility.

This traditional act of pysanka (“pih-sahn-kah”) is made by using wax and dyes, but this colourful custom didn’t take off until Ukrainian immigrants came to the U.S.

The holiday was named after the Anglo-Saxon Goddess, Eostre

The idea that the witches of winter should be banished at Easter is a common European folk motif appearing in several festivities and rituals. The spring equinox, with its promise of new life, was held symbolically in opposition to the life-draining activities of witches and winter.

This idea provides the underlying rationale behind various festivities and rituals, such as the Osterfeuer, or Easter Fire, a celebration in Germany involving large outdoor bonfires meant to scare away witches. In Sweden, popular folklore states that at Easter, the witches all fly away on their broomsticks to feast and dance with the devil on the legendary island of Blåkulla, in the Baltic Sea.

In 1835, the folklorist Jacob Grimm, one of the famous team of the fairy tale Brothers Grimm, argued that the Easter hare was connected to a goddess he imagined would have been called “Ostara” in ancient German. He derived this name from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, who Bede, an early medieval monk considered to be the father of English history, mentioned in 731 C.E.

The UK’s first chocolate egg was produced in Bristol in 1873

Have you ever wondered who started the trend of tucking into chocolate-shaped eggs on Easter Sunday?

It was during the 19th century that the Fry family of Bristol ran the largest chocolate factory in the world and produced the first chocolate egg, in 1873.

It was two years later in 1875 that saw Cadbury’s make their first Easter egg.

Cadbury’s make 500 million Creme Eggs every year! If you piled them on top of each other, it would be 10 x higher than Mount Everest.

The Birmingham factory produces 1.5 million Creme Eggs every day, and the Creme Egg is the most popular egg-shaped chocolate in the world.


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References:
-> https://www.almanac.com/content/when-is-easter
-> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-ancient-origins-of-the-easter-bunny-180979915/
-> https://www.sykescottages.co.uk/blog/10-fun-facts-about-easter-you-probably-didnt-know/