Why I Don’t Believe In The Easter Bunny
No, I’m not a party pooper.
As a child, I remember pondering on the enigma of Easter bunnies and Easter eggs. It was around the time I learned that bunnies don’t lay eggs and I pestered my parents as to what was the relationship between a bunny and the supposed execution of Jesus of Nazareth.
Neither of them knew and of course this was many years before the introduction of the all-knowing internet.
My grandparents had a set of encyclopedias but the information on Easter bunnies and the Christian religion was very scant. Today, information on the tradition of the Easter bunny is somewhat mixed and contradictory but a common thread appears to involve German immigrants arriving in Pennsylvania back in the 1700s and bringing with them a traditional story of a hare named Osterhouse who delivered eggs to children at Easter. The hare would lay eggs it seemed and deliver them to children who were “good”. Sound familiar? Its a variation on the old Santa Claus theme.
How the Osterhouse hare laid eggs (hares are mammals) is never explained. Nor is how Osterhouse the hare transformed into a rabbit or a bunny as kids know them as today.
One little tidbit that kind of makes sense is the rabbit was considered a symbol of fertility and as Easter came around the beginning…
