The supermarkets seem to be playing it rather low-key this Easter. I had thought it was just Morrisons; they have only the best part of one aisle (instead of a whole two aisles in the past) dedicated to Easter products, and a lot of these – Lindt mini-eggs, for example – ran out in March and have not been re-stocked. But yesterday I went to Sainsbury’s, and found the same story there. It may be that they don’t want to end up with a load of surplus chocolate, which Morrisons certainly did after Christmas. But at this rate the only chocolate eggs left by Easter Saturday are going to be the really expensive ones and Cadbury’s creme eggs, which are year-rounders. Waitrose, meanwhile, have introduced a series of chocolate ‘Woodland Friends’, two owls (milk and white), a hedgehog, and a frog, which have nothing to do with Easter at all, but are apparently selling well.
You may well ask what have eggs and bunnies to do with Easter, either. The association of eggs with spring and rebirth is certainly pre-Christian, as is the practice of decorating them; and very soon Christianity had adapted these traditions. The egg symbolised the stone in front of Christ’s tomb that was rolled away, and the empty egg stood for the Resurrection. Mary Magdalen was said to have been carrying eggs in her basket when she met the risen Christ, and the eggs spontaneously turned red in memory of Christ’s shed blood. To this day the Greeks colour their hard-boiled eggs red, and elsewhere in Europe they are decorated with crosses and other motifs. There’s a lovely entry in Edward I’s household accounts of 1307 of ’18 pence for 450 eggs to be boiled and dyed or covered with gold leaf and distributed to the royal household’.
Of course, there was a practical reason for eggs at Easter, too; eggs, like dairy products, were originally forbidden during Lent; and as hens didn’t stop laying, the accumulated result was hard boiled for preservation and distributed at Easter. The chocolate sort are a modern interpretation of the papier-maché eggs designed in the 19th Century to hold gifts and sweets; originally a luxury item, they didn’t catch on until the 1950s when rationing stopped and mass-marketing began. Then there was no stopping them, until in Britain at least real eggs were forgotten, and at the last count the average child will get eight ostrich-sized chocolate eggs.
The Easter Bunny is a hybrid creature which owes its existence to a fertility symbol and zoological ignorance, and has very little to do with Christianity, although I have read that a rabbit is sometimes brought into church ‘especially for the children’s message’. It was originally a hare, associated with Eostre, the Germanic Spring Goddess, from whom we get our name for the event. But why hares with eggs? Some say it is because folklore confused hares’ forms with plovers’ nests, but it seems that German Protestants invented the Osterhase along the lines of Father Christmas, to bring eggs to children at Easter without any of the Catholic baggage; and Americans, more familiar with rabbits…. you get the idea.
Today’s saint is St Casilda of Toledo, who although raised a Muslim, refused to be treated by Muslim doctors when she fell ill as a young woman, and instead put her trust in the healing powers of the shrine of San Vicente. She was cured, and is said to have lived to be a hundred before dying in 1050AD. Another of today’s saints said to have lived to a hundred is the wonderfully named St Dotto of Orkney. Among those who didn’t were the nine martyrs of Croyland Abbey, slaughtered by the Vikings, although one of them, Grimkeld, sounds Norse himself. The skull of the Abbot, Theodore, is still in the parish church, a remnant of the Benedictine Abbey (also called Crowland).