To not do the Easter Bunny?

[Supermagicsmile]

All the mums in DD's class seem to be doing it in a big way. They were talking about it at a party at the weekend and now I feel really guilty that we've never done it.
Dd is old enough to ask so I also feel bad as I don't have an explanation for why when she inevitably asks why she didn't get a visit from the Easter Bunny when everyone else did.
What would you say? Would you cave and just do it so she's not left out? I don't have any real opposition, just never grew up with it so haven't done it for mine either.

The Easter Bunny seems to be an almost exclusively American thing,

It's fucking German!

This is the reality of the Easter bunny

WE always had an ‘Easter bunny hunt’ growing up but it was never made out to be a magical thing like Santa.
The dcs have asked if the Easter bunny will visit them this year and I’m not sure what to tell them! I feel that telling them there’s no such thing may cause them to reassess the existence of the more traditional magical gift beaters!
I blame rise of the guardians.

bearers!

We do the Easter Bunny!

It’s lovely. DH and I hide the eggs the night before, all over the house. Kids come down in the morning, they get their easter buckets, and go hunting.

They absolutely love it, and so do we.

But, there’s no right or wrong way to ‘do’ the bunny

Bloody weird bunny if it lays chocolate eggs...! Perhaps some of the grumpy pagans on the thread could explain the biology?
And surely they should have some other word for their odd ritual. Easter refers to the Christian festival of the resurrection.

Is it a southern tradition? All our soft southern neighbours do it, I'd never heard of the Easter bunny until I moved down here.

I was mooching round a garden centre shop at the weekend. There were loads of decorations, even ‘Easter trees’. What’s going on??

The Easter bunny leaves a chocolate egg. That's it. What exactly is there to "do"?

Easter trees, or rather collecting small branches off trees to put in a vase is a thing from DH’s home country. We do a big spring clean leading up to it then decorate the house with these to celebrate spring. It is the same as a bunch of daffodils for us, marks the end of winter. It is lovely when the tree blossom flowers.

We have the Easter bird. Wtf would a bunny be doing with eggs

YABVU it's a hare, not a bloody bunny!

We color eggs and put out the kids' baskets, and the Easter Bunny hides the eggs at night while they're sleeping, and fills their baskets with treats. It's not a huge deal, I'll probably buy all the stuff at Target on Saturday.

My folks always used to do the Easter-egg hunt, with the bunny hiding the eggs, for me. I loved it

I'm another who's not really familiar with what the Easter bunny is meant to do.

But we do give them an Easter egg.

Actually, hiding a few little ones round the house seems like quite a nice idea, I might try it. But I'll not be letting a rabbit take the credit for it.

OMG terfenough those pictures!!! SO funny-

Babdoc sorry, but that's a bit rich! given that the Christians took over pagan holidays in this first place you really can't complain if Christian festivities get "contaminated" with pagan themes, maybe the Church should have picked their own dates in the fist place if they didn't like bunnies associated with Christ... and, just to reinforce the point, from the Oxford dictionary: Easter - Origin, Old English ēastre; of Germanic origin and related to German Ostern and east; perhaps from Ēastre, the name of a goddess associated with spring.

My family always goes in for the Easter celebrations in a big way. Both in the Catholic sense (for my Mum it's the more significant and preferred than Christmas) and in all the family fun and games ways too. We, as children, decorated eggs in the lead up and always went through the pantomime of the Easter Bunny knocking at the door and then a big hunt. We still do and my Mum still leads it!

When I was growing up in the eighties the Easter bunny left a chocolate egg in the lounge on Easter morning. For my children the bunny leaves a small gift on Easter morning, that's all. It's no effort. Gift isn't even wrapped. Everything else comes from people who buy for dc, and their will be an egg hunt at my mums.

Believe me most people don’t do it, sometimes it’s an organised charity event, or done one year for a family occasion but very few take up as an annual event.

So is this just mn or an English thing? I am an Aussie and I have never met anybody who does not do the easter bunny. People have their own ways of doing it but everyone seems to do something.

It definitely seems to have become a thing recently. I teach Year 1 and one of the children in my class asked me yesterday if the Easter bunny was going to leave an Easter egg on her pillow.

When I was a kid way back in the 70's I'd always be given an Easter egg, but had never even heard of the Easter bunny. I remember coming across it in an American children's book and being quite confused.

Bunnies pre-date the Christians stealing Easter from the pagans etc

Not in the UK, they were either bought over by the Normans, or possibly by the Romans earlier. Rabbits are not a native species.

There is never going to be a uniform approach to this by all parents. Even if you do participate in the easter bunny, there will be some child at school bragging about how they got 100's of eggs, while others only get a few

Hares are native though. And around this time of the year they are particularly active hence the association with the spring festivals celebrating fertility