Blu I'm with you there.
LDNmummy "My child can have chocolate, just not when it is in a celebration of what I believe to be a hypocritcal religious celebration. Especially when I don't see what eggs have to do with Jesus' death and ressurection." Perhaps because your view on the Spring celebration is ignorant... and ignorant means 'not knowing', not that you are stupid.
DD doesn't get chocolate bars or any junk/fried/processed food for that matter 95% of the time, but for birthdays, Winter and Spring celebrations, I'm more than happy to develop our own traditions. We decorated hard boiled eggs, made some cookies and I bought a packet of Cadbury's eggs and hid them for her... not a big deal. I feel its a good thing to develop traditions within family for times of the years that humans have celebrated, like this time of the year, the coming of Spring and new life.
Easter is a combination of important events in different traditions.
Easter comes near to the time of the spring equinox on 21 March, when the length of the day and night are equal. Throughout history, many ancient cultures have celebrated this as a time of birth and renewal, following the darkness of the long winter.
In Christianity, Easter is preceded by Holy Week. This week includes Maundy Thursday, which commemorates Jesus' last supper with his disciples; and Good Friday, which remembers the day of his death. These somber days are then followed by Easter Sunday to celebrate the day that Jesus rose from the dead three days after his crucifixion.
Easter is also related to the Jewish holiday of Passover, a period that remembers Israelites' freedom from slavery in ancient Egypt. This is observed during Nisan, the first month of the Hebrew lunar year ? which also happens to be between March and April.
The term "Easter" is derived from the Teutonic goddess of spring and fertility, whose name is Eostre. Pagans had festivals in her honor during the spring equinox, when daytime is equal to night time.
So where did the Easter bunny and eggs come from?
Easter bunny, goes back a very long way and pre-dates Christianity. The historical intermingling of pagan, Christian and Jewish beliefs and practices has left its legacy in many of the things we maybe take for granted about Easter and its traditions today.
European pagan religion incorporated rabbits and hares in their celebration as a symbol of fertility. In Germany, pagans even named their hare "Oschter Haws" and early settlers introduced him to America during the 1700's. In their stories, Oschter Haws left eggs the night before Easter for the children to hunt and find on Easter morning ? some children would even build "nests" for these anticipated eggs in baskets and bonnets.
Who put the egg in Easter?
Though the roots of the celebrations are different, many cultures around the world observe spring holidays and festivals centered on the common theme of rebirth and the egg as a symbol of the source of life.
Dyed eggs were shared and eaten at spring festivals in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Persia and China. Gradually these traditions made their way westward and were expressed in various forms ? from dyed goose eggs to beautifully decorated paper mâché eggs in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the late 19th and early 20th century the ultimate Easter eggs ? the Fabergé eggs made their royal appearance.
Eggs were used to represent resurrection ? a celebration of new life in Christianity. While the origin of coloring eggs is unknown, some reports date it back as far as 2,500 years ago where Zoroastrians painted eggs for a New Year celebration. Today, for varying reasons, beliefs, or for just plain fun, people from different cultures all over the world dye eggs and present them as gifts or as little treasures around Easter time.
Chocolate eggs come from Europe. Today?s European tradition of giving chocolate Easter eggs as gifts can be traced back to 19th century France and Germany. The first eggs were small and solid and made of a bitter dark chocolate. As technology improved and cocoa became more widely available, so did chocolate Easter eggs. The tradition spread to many parts of Europe, often with each country making their own unique mark.
The first mass-produced chocolate egg appeared in England in 1873 when Cadbury debuted their first Easter egg. It wasn?t until the early 1900s that milk chocolate Easter eggs became available. The modern chocolate Easter egg with its smoothness, shape and flavour owes its progression to the two greatest developments in the history of chocolate - the invention of a press for separating cocoa butter from the cocoa bean by the Dutch inventor Van Houten in 1828 and the introduction of a pure cocoa by Cadbury Brothers in 1866. The Cadbury process made large quantities of cocoa butter available and this was the secret of making moulded chocolate or indeed, any fine eating chocolate.