Comparing Easter as adults versus Easter as children
Logically speaking, can you actually remember how old you were when remembering your first Easter?
Was your first Easter remembered as waking up and finding an Easter basket full of pretty green-shredded plastic grass filled with colorful jelly beans, other candies and a chocolate Easter bunny?
If so, relax, you’re normal, because to most of us as children in the 20th century, we did the same; that’s how commercial Easter has become.
The Easter bunny is the biggest commercial symbol of Easter, but explaining the correlation of rabbits and dyed eggs and how they became associated with the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ can become a sticky, chocolaty fiasco when explaining to young minds, because actually there is NO mention of an Easter bunny in the Bible.
History says the Easter bunny first arrived in America in the 1700s with German immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania and transported their tradition of an “egg-laying” hare called “Osterhase.” Their children made nests in which this creature could lay its colored eggs. Much like leaving cookies out for Santa, German children often left carrots out, hoping the bunny would leave them extra special candy.
Easter — the second-best candy holiday following Halloween — offers mostly chocolate eggs, chocolate bunnies, jelly beans, marshmallow Peeps and other sweet confections. It would help explaining to children the connection of Easter baskets on Easter morning with the true meaning of Easter if there happens to be a chocolate candy Cross in the basket so parents could relate to them what Jesus did for us when hanging on the cross.
“He Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteous.” 1 Peter 2:24.
The cross, a strong Christian symbol used in jewelry and on the peak of church steeples, is displayed on church grounds during the 40 days of Lent preceding Easter. It starts out draped with a purple shroud, representing passion and redemption, with a black shroud replacing it on Good Friday, representing sorrow of the day Jesus was crucified, and then with a white shroud on Easter Sunday, representing the joy of His resurrection. His resurrection represents the triumph of good over evil, sin, death, and the physical body.
Easter is the most important holiday, along with Christmas, on the Christian calendar, and has been regularly observed from early days of the church. But it is a “movable feast,” having no fixed date, as Christmas does. However, it is always on a Sunday.
This date is dictated by the moon; being based on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, which is spring. Our first full moon after the vernal equinox in 2020 is April 7, making the first Sunday after that, April 12, EASTER!
Other symbols and festivities that go hand in hand with Easter are dyed Easter eggs, Easter bonnets and new Easter clothes for sunrise church services. Also, some blooms on plants and trees designate specific meanings concerning Easter. The flower of the dogwood tree, and the Passion Flower, aka Maypop, can tell a story of the crucifixion of Jesus.
Becky Dingle — a born North Carolina “Tarh Heel” who ended up a South Carolina “Sandlapper” social studies teacher for over 28 years — tells the story correlating the Passion Flower with the crucifixion. She said her philosophy concerning her “story-telling” approach in teaching social studies matches a Rudyard Kipling quote: “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”
Possibly, combining some simple stories concerning different symbols representing Easter, along with the chocolate bunny in the Easter basket, relayed to a child before attending church on Easter Sunday, will give them a “moment to remember.”
“Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” John 1:29.
Jean Tanner may be reached at jstmeema@hargray.com.