How on Earth are Easter, Eggs and BUNNIES even related.
I don’t know how many of you know this, but other than making earrings and uploading the designs online and sending them all over the country to beautiful owners with an excellent taste in things, I’m a food stylist.
I love my alternative career even though sometimes it gts a bit challenging. Earlier in February, I was hired to style raw meat for a Bangalore based start up called Brown Apron.. All this was not so bad since I’m a non vegetarian my self… but some of them were pretty hard to do. One of the hardest to style was RABBIT. Though it turned out to be one of my favourite shots from the series (it had a very Edgar Allan Poe Vibe to it, I have very conflicting feelings about it. Because BUNNY !!! L )
While I was dealing with the Rabbit, the song “Peter Cotton Tail” was playing in my head… Only the Lyrics were now “Here comes Peter Cottontail”… Hopping down the bunny trail hippity hoppity Easter’s DEAD AND IN THE OVEN.
Anyone who knows me know that I go into a completely random tangent while thinking about stuff and this SONG got me thinking what on EARTH is the relationship between EASTER, BUNNIES and EGGS????
So I did a bit of googling (how did we survive before the internet existed again?) and the answer is fairly simple and not the LEAST bit exciting…
The origin of the Easter Bunny itself can be traced back to 13th Century Pre Christian GERMANY when people worshipped several gods and goddesses. One of these goddesses was Eostra who was the Goddess of Spring and Fertility. Her symbol was the Rabbit because of the Animal’s high reproductive rate (does the word “breeding like rabbits” ring a bell?).
Ok Fine. So the bunny is explained… What about the EGGS?! Another simple explanation – Spring Symbolized new life and eggs were an ancient symbol of fertility. An alternative explanation is that orthodox Christians used to abstain from consuming meat/eggs and the only way to prevent them from going waste was to boil or roast them… and then eat them upon breaking their fast ( I don’t know how effective this was since technically, the period of lent is like 50 days AT LEAST)
As usual, practices prevalent before the birth of Christianity were somewhat incorporated into the celebration of Easter – spring, rebirth, new life sort of fit snugly into the whole concept of the Jesus’ rebirth.
I still think the people who came up with the concept of a Bunny rabbit distributing eggs on easter was high on some sort of mind altering drugs though … MAYBE, the orthodox dudes who roasted/ boiled the eggs to save them from going waste stored them in some sort of BRINE…. and because they were being stored over a long period of time, they made their own sort of noxious fume/mind altering drug thing and HENCE the bunnies and eggs association – BEST EXPLANATION.
(for whole video of this amazing dog click here)