To wonder when all this Easter Bunny nonsense started?

[Housewife2010]

As a child I was given eggs by my family which I started on Easter Sunday. We give our children two eggs each and have an egg hunt and a few other chocolate treats. On FB now I see that the Easter Bunny has visited friend's houses and left masses of chocolate and presents. Is this the norm now? I would never have thought of buying Easter gifts.

We get a couple of small eggs and a small gift for DD. She’s not overfond of chocolate, and I think I had more chocolate eggs when I was a kid.
But the thing she gets MOST excited about is the treasure hunt we leave round the house to help her find them!

I’m 35 and Easter bunny always hid our Easter eggs. Definitely not a new thing. Same as Easter cards we’ve always had them. Don’t see how having the Easter bunny being the eggs is a bad thing at all, just adds to the fun. Easter has always been a big deal in our house though. We’ve always had big family Christmas dinner for Easter with a Christmas pudding saved from Christmas.

We buy a chocolate rabbit from Aldi and say the Easter Bunny left it instead of an egg. W.e give 1 large egg and a few creme eggs to child. My adult children get the Easter egg but not Easter Bunny. We say he only comes to younger children. The only gift was new outfit for grandchild who my dd says is too small for an Easter egg or Bunny.

YANBU!

We gave the children an Easter-themed pencil and eraser each at the breakfast table as a "surprise from the Easter bunny" and explained that there's no such thing as an Easter bunny, but some children think there is and please don't tell them. Like previous posters, we explained that marketers make things like this up to make us buy things we don't need...and that's why we got them pencils and erasers, which were useful. The kids took it in their stride (although you never really know until they are or aren't in therapy in 20 years' time!).

And no, we weren't utter scrooges...we organized an Easter egg hunt with friends and hid little treats in plastic eggs around the garden. No huge chocolate eggs like we used to get, we might do that when they're a bit older and able to handle the chocolate rush!

I remember being about 5 and being terrified of the Easter bunny because my older brother had told me that the Easter bunny slept under my bed and would steal all the Easter eggs.

However I think it's a nice ideal even more so that DS1 is obsessed with rabbits. He gets one small egg/ shaped chocolate from the Easter bunny and a craft activity we would buy anyway and one small egg from us. So about 3-4 quid in total.

Get over it
No one says you have to buy but why rubbish others idea of how thier easter works?
Its just like me starting a thread saying how sad so many kids get jipped with only 1 egg, no bunny and stuck in a boring church all day listening to bs

We do the bunny, we get gifts, loads of chocolate.
Even dd school has the principal dress up as a bunny for the kids, class egg hunts, its awesome for them

Enjoy your easter your way, forget what others do, much less angst all round

Easter bunny films have been around since the 1940’s so it’s not a new thing. I had chocolate from the easter bunny and I’m 40. Just because children believe in the easter bunny is not a bad thing, you can believe and have 1 egg. What’s wrong with it, same as Santa or the tooth fairy. It’s not a new thing. I agree some people go over the top but who cares??

In our house the 'easter bunny' buys 4 eggs in the tesco buy 2 get 2 free offer, then splits the eggs a small chocolate in the egg box and leaves a hunt of ryming clues to follow to find them ( the 'easter bunny' regrets the ryming clue, but not as much as the 'tooth fairy' regrets the letters for each tooth) only child, 8 years old, even she is using the '' now

My family always gave presents and I still do. When I was a kid you got about two eggs but I remember friends getting carrier bags full of eggs. I think kids get fewer eggs now than I remember in the mid eighties. The Easter Bunny in our house was always tongue in cheek as it was obviously me putting out the eggs for a hunt.

Agreed. As a child we got eggs from parents and some relatives. Sometimes we got a present from DP e.g. Stuffed bunny or chick. We rolled hard-boiled eggs.

With my DC - much the same, except used to do hunt in garden and now they are older we rolll them. The hunt was organised by us and DC knew this - there was no Easter bunny. I did not know this was a thing until a few years ago.

In France, children (under5) believe the bells fly back from Rome and drop eggs in the garden and the children search for the eggs. Germany also do hunts but I think it is recent that it started here.

I always got new shoes at Easter. My mum was odd

It appears the Easter bunny hiding eggs has been around since 1700s at least and even earlier in older German stories so definitely not a new thing. I’m genuinely surprised people think it’s a new marketing idea as it was always a thing growing up.

In 1940’s & 1950’s England the Easter bunny wasn’t a tradition we knew about. Chocolate was still rationed and the egg we were given each year was a brightly pastel coloured icing egg so hard we couldn’t manage to eat them. They had a little “window “ in the end which you peeked through for a view inside. One year it was was a crucifixion scene (very cheerful).
We were told that th Fairies brought the eggs.
In 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s NZ Chocolate eggs were usually marshmallow eggs. No-one we knew had egg hunts. The Easter bunny was round but no one made much of a fuss about it — was mainly confined to cards . Going into Autumn so strange the cards also featured chicks and Spring flowers.

The origins are Pagan and the Osterhase (Easter hare) is much celebrated in Germany. Nobody’s forcing you to spend money on chocolate rabbits.

I'm 46 and the Easter Bunny used to leave my eggs in the Magic Cupboard (my Mum was a bit eccentric!)

Easter Bunny visits here, just like the Tooth Fairy does, and Santa. It's fun, it's magical, and makes my children happy. They get a few eggs, but they last a month or more. Easter Bunny also leaves a small but useful gift - not tat. When they were tiny, it would be a cuddly toy rabbit or an egg- or bunny-related book (e.g. The Odd Egg, or Guess How Much I Love You), this year they got hula hoops (the things you spin round your waist, not those crisp things you eat off your fingers) - a little welcome to spring. Just a little something other than chocolate. We also do the egg hunt, my children love it.

I went to a school attached to a church in the late 70's and even though we had our very own school vicar we also had the easter bunny.

By lucky coincidence, on the day the easter bunny came to visit, the caretaker would have decided to paint something, and the bunny would manage to get into the paint and leave paw prints all over the entrance hall to the school.

We would leave for the easter break with a palm cross, a paper basket we'd made and decorated, an easter card that always had a cross on it, a creme egg that the bunny had managed to hide in the baskets without us seeing him do it, and a badly painted daffodil made from an egg carton and some wonkily cut yellow and green card.

But the whole thing of eggs and rabbits goes back to pagan times and the more modern take on it (egg hunts and such) is at least a couple of hundred years old from German customs I think.

Faberge Eggs were easter eggs .....