How a Rabbit Bearing Eggs Became a Symbol of Easter

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Easter is a season of mysteries. None, however, is a greater mystery than how a rabbit (who delivers brightly colored eggs) became the symbol of Easter in America today.

Rabbits have been important symbols to people of many faiths for millennia. From China and India to Africa and the Americas, people have raised their eyes to the Moon and beheld a rabbit. This isn't an accident or coincidence. For many ancient peoples, rabbits symbolized fertility and those people would have recognized that the rabbit gestation period fit the lunar cycle almost perfectly. Hence, the bunny in the Moon. 

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The image may be based in symbols of fertility, but the stories that have grown around it often have a sacrificial theme. For instance, the Aztecs say the god Quetzalcoatl put the image of the rabbit on the Moon in remembrance of her willingness to sacrifice herself so that he wouldn't starve. This story is similar to the Japanese tale "Tsuki no Usagi." The stories told among Cree, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Chinese communities all share sacrifice as a central theme similar to these stories.

Sacrifice is also central to the Christian story of Easter. And the Moon dictates the day on which Easter falls each year. Perhaps linking Easter with a rabbit is not so surprising when you look at it that way. That hardly explains how bunnies came to deliver Easter eggs. 

Like the rabbit, the egg has a long history of religious symbolism. Most often an egg is a symbol of birth, or rebirth, which is ideal for Easter. But birds, not rabbits, lay eggs. So why should the Easter bunny bring Easter eggs rather than an Easter bird of some kind?

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The root of this practice lies in the legend of Eostre or Eastre, the Teutonic goddess of dawn, who was known to transform herself into a four-footed creature of renowned fertility. Her story somehow gets conflated with a 19th Century tradition of giving Easter gifts. At the time Christians in Germany and Hungary often put effigies of rabbits in the baskets of eggs they gave as gifts. Eggs were a luxury that could not be consumed during Lent so the baskets may have represented a great feast appropriate to celebrating Easter and the Resurrection. As to how the story got to America, that credit (or blame) goes to the Pennsylvania Dutch. They may also have brought the tradition of rolling eggs on the ground in a kind of race perhaps intended to remind believers of the stone that sealed the door to Jesus' for three days which when rolled away revealed the Resurrection.

Over time, it seems the bunny got out of the basket and people started hiding the eggs. Whether the eggs were hidden to escape temptation or as a reminder that they once symbolized the real Easter treasure is unclear. Whatever the reason, a tradition was born that continues to this day. And the Easter Bunny has come down from the Moon and become one of the most beloved and recognized holiday symbols in the country.