First off, Happy Easter to all our Christian friends. I have a question related to Easter. When I was growing up, the Easter Bunny was a big thing...not as big as Santa Claus, but up there. He, supposedly, brought the Easter basket, and there were people walking around dressed up like the Easter bunny. When I was getting my hair cut today, my hair dresser (who is also Jewish) and I were wondering if the Easter Bunny is still popular. According to some Christians who were there, he isn't at all. Is that the case? If he's not, why not? Or maybe the Easter Bunny was just popular in Wisconsin where I lived? Do/did they have the Easter Bunny in England?

It's not really an English tradition. It does crop up on some kids' shows but mainly in imitation of the American tradition.

I don't know the history of the Easter Bunny - I doubt it's British thing. My guess is that it might have something to do with the antics of hares around Easter time - but that's purely a guess.

The Easter Bunny seems to be a pagan Germanic tradition brought to the US by German or Dutch immigrants. (In German and Dutch he's called a hare rather than a bunny.)) The ancient goddess Eastre is mentioned by Bede in his book on calculating the time of Easter. Most European languages use a Hebrew loan word for Passover (English has Paschal) פסח (pesach) for Easter. Eastre is thought to be related to Germanic words for East. (And the activities of fighting and mating male hares in spring time lead to the phrase [i]mad as a March hare".)

My son loved the tradition of hunting for hidden eggs and a basket of goodies on Easter morning. He's grown past that, now, and was satisfied this weekend with some extra spending money at the Natural History Museum we visited in Pittsburgh with my mother on Saturday.

When I was a kid, my folks would hide up to 3 dozen boiled and colored eggs - I think they even hid them the night before! And they'd hide a basket for each of us 3 kids.

Not wanting to leave eggs out overnight, Mike and I have always used plastic eggs, filled with clues for a hunt around the house and yard. Simon would have to follow the clues to the final prize, often a big pile of drawing supplies with some candy thrown in for tradition's sake.

We never made a big deal about the EB, and we always scoffed at the costumed bunny people when we saw them. I don't think it's really something that my Christian friends continue. Knowing that the bunny is really auxilliary to our religious beliefs about what Easter stands for, it seems ridiculous to make the bunny any kind of focus for the weekend. Egg hunts are still fun, though, just for the fun of finding hidden goodies!

Oh yes, one last note about the Natural History Museum (the Carnegie). They had an activity for the kids yesterday where the children (younger than 10) would have to answer questions about something or other, probably dinosaurs, and they would be able to collect plastic eggs with stickers inside and get a little "passport" stamped. There were stations all around the museum. I overheard one task-oriented mother say "stop looking at those dinosaurs, we have 2 more eggs to find." Can you believe it?

Interesting. When I was growing up, the Easter Bunny was really big. He delivered all the goodies.

quote:

I overheard one task-oriented mother say "stop looking at those dinosaurs, we have 2 more eggs to find." Can you believe it?

Unfortunately, yes. I remember when I used to take my kids to the park, I'd hear these mothers of really young children talking about how filled their kids' days were with one class after another. Now research shows that heavily scheduled children aren't as curious and therefore learning is negatively effected. It seemed like a no-brainer to me.

I heard a sound bite recently on how goalless play is beneficial in the intellectual development of children.

http://www.englishverse.com/poems/leisure