I must admit that I have not hidden Easter eggs for my kids the last couple of years (I did make hot cross buns on Good Friday!), but of course the tradition of the Easter Bunny hiding coloured eggs for children remains very popular in Western culture. I scanned several articles about the origins of the Easter Bunny and surprisingly the most informative came from Country Living magazine.
First things first, you may be wondering whether rabbits and eggs have anything to do with Easter as the celebration of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It turn out that both are symbols associated with springtime and rabbits also have ties to the Virgin Mary (see this painting by Titian) due to the mistaken notion that they could reproduce asexually. As for eggs, at one time they (as well as meat and dairy) were not eaten during Lent, but saved for Easter.
The earliest known mention of the Easter Bunny itself (AKA Oschter Haws) is in a German text from 1572; the English translation reads, “Do not worry if the Easter Bunny escapes you; should we miss his eggs, we will cook the nest.” The Easter Bunny is also mentioned in the writing of Georg Franck von Franckenau, a German physician and botanist, in 1682. Sometime around 1778 we find the first American depiction of the Easter Bunny — a picture made by artist Johannn Conrad Gilbert, who immigrated to Pennsylvania from Germany in 1757. Thus, there is clear documentation that the tradition of the Easter Bunny came to North America from Germany.
Interestingly, the idea that the Easter Bunny is related to the pagan Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre (or the Germanic goddess Ostara) only dates back to the 19th century. For much more information and evidence, you can check out two articles by Stephen Winick, writer and editor at the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, which were cited in the Country Living article:
I hope you had a blessed Easter and maybe learned something new!