Bonking isn’t really the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the Easter Bunny. Unless it is, in which case, we’re not sure we can help you.
Moving on.
For generations, parents have been hiding chocolate eggs in pot plants and around the back garden, telling their children the treats are gifts from the magical Easter Bunny.
Easter being a Christian holiday symbolising the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, one could assume a ye olden time Easter Bunny might’ve come from biblical beginnings.
However, it would appear the opposite is true. So how did the Easter Bunny become such a huge symbol of the Christian celebration?
Short answer: sex. Or, more politely put, procreation.
To find out exactly why we’ll be stuffing our faces with sweet, delicious chocolate rabbits this Easter, we dove deep on the history and origins of the modern Easter Bunny.
Side note – you really ought to try this easy no-bake Easter recipe ASAP. Post continues after video.
Where does the Easter Bunny come from?
So where did the Easter Bunny come from? By all accounts, Germany.
Some folklorists have suggested the Easter Bunny comes from German folklore and an ancient Anglo-Saxon myth around the fertility goddess Ostara. The Encyclopedia Mythica explains that:
“Ostara is the personification of the rising sun. In that capacity she is associated with the spring and is considered a fertility goddess. She is the friend of all children and to amuse them she changed her pet bird into a rabbit. This rabbit brought forth brightly coloured eggs, which the Greek goddess gave to children as gifts. From her name and rites the festival of Easter is derived.”
According to The Conversation, the earliest published reference of the Easter Bunny and its egg-laying abilities is in a late 16th-century German text. A German tradition dictated Osterhase or Oschter Haws, as their Easter Bunny was originally called, would lay coloured eggs in nests made by children over the Easter period.
History.com reports this tradition made it to America when a group of Germans immigrated to Pennsylvania in the 1700s. Come the 19th century, actual eggs had been replaced with chocolate eggs, and nests with baskets. Easter Bunny chocolates also started popping up – the creators of possibly the world’s most famous chocolate bunny, the Lindt Easter Bunny, claim their bunny-shaped chocolate was inspired when one of the Maîtres Chocolatiers saw a little bunny one morning in his garden.
