Easter: chocolate, church or family?

“I always hoped that on Easter Sunday sun would shine because I love looking for Easter Eggs outside in the garden”, this is Rosa´s experience. But do we know what Easter is? Indeed, is it a family moment, some religious event or just another commercial try to sell chocolate?

“Easter is a Catholic holiday, that´s a fact; but if you ask what it means for me, I would say ´time spend with my family´. Yes, we prepare the Easter basket and go to church to have it blessed by the priest. Then we come back home and eat together”, this is, at least in Poland, for Beata Jaranowska.

But it is also “we stand up really, really, early (everyone tries to be the first to find something) and search the whole flat or garden. At the end, we all have the same amount of chocolate, so there was no argument. My family has never been too much religious, so going to the church wasn´t really an issue”, Rosa von Scheidt from Germany.


Pascha, Pasch, Easter or Pascua, the language does not matter, comes from the Norsemen's Eostur, Eastar, Ostara, and Ostar, and the pagan goddess Eostre, all of which involve the season of the growing sun and new birth. For Christians, the Easter egg is the symbol of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Also, Easter is the second best-selling candy holiday in America, after Halloween, and over 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies are made each year. So is the egg and rabbit tradition something created just to increase sells? Indeed, there is a reason, even if the origins are not clear. “The ancient Egyptians, Persians, Phoenicians, and Hindus all believed the world began with an enormous egg, thus the egg as a symbol of new life has been around for eons”, as Rosa admitted before.

But chocolate and rabbits are not the only symbols. In Spain, Easter is nothing compare with the whole festival week called Semana Santa - Holly Week. Multitudinous parades in every region of the country, women with dark clothes crying and following a sculpture of Jesus. It is surprising if you think Spain is a secular country and for the whole week everything is close and there is no school. Even if in some parts of the country, egg tradition is not so common, in Alicante, for example, there is something called Mona de Pascua, some bread covering a decorated egg.

“Nowadays my siblings don´t live at home, and my parents don´t buy or hide chocolate any more. They think I am too old, but who is too old for chocolate? So Easter doesn´t mean so much to me any more”, Rosa admits. In Spain only godfathers or mothers are the ones who give some chocolate eggs or some gifts to their nephews. “According to the National Confectioners Association, over 16 billion jelly beans are made in the U.S. each year for Easter, enough to fill a giant egg measuring 89 feet high and 60 feet wide.”. “The largest Easter egg ever made was over 25 feet high and weighed over 8,000 pounds. It was built out of chocolate and marshmallow and supported by an internal steel frame”.

So maybe Easter is not as religious as it was at the beginning but not as commercial as Saint Valentine´s Day or other celebrations. Maybe it is just another excuse to be together.

 

 

 

Sabela González

 

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