It’s that time of year again, when crying babies are forced to take pictures with strangers dressed in bunny suits, parents hide plastic eggs and send their children out to find, and people eat chocolate effigies of rabbits.
Happy Easter, everyone.
While individual American Easter traditions may differ from family to family, one common denominator is food. Apparently, over 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies are made each year. Another popular treat is marshmallow Peeps. The company that produces them estimated that, in 2014, 1.5 billion Peeps are consumed during the Easter season. That’s a lot of marshmallows.
What is Easter?
I’m so glad you asked! Easter Sunday—also known as Pasch or Resurrection Sunday—is a religious festival celebrating Jesus’s rise from the dead in the New Testament. What starts like the beginning of Night of the Living Dead is actually the foundation of the Christian faith.
Unlike most holidays, Easter has no set date. Instead, Christian churches celebrate Easter on the first Sunday following the full moon after the vernal equinox on March 21. This means that Easter cane be observed anywhere between March 22 and April 25 each year.
Not only is the date shaky, but the exact origins of the day’s name are also unknown. Some sources claim the word Easter is derived from “Eostre,” a Pagan goddess of spring and fertility with Germanic origins. This connection to new life may actually explain the bunnies, eggs, and chicks—all of which are popular symbols of fertility. Another theory is that the word comes from Latin term “hebdomada alba,” which means “white week.” Through a translation error, the word was transcribed as “esostarum” in Old High German. This would eventually became “Easter” in English.
