Things you didn’t know and didn’t like to ask….
Why does the date more around so much?
Because the date of Passover moves around, and according to the biblical account, Easter is tied to the Passover. Passover celebrates the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt and it lasts for seven days, from the middle of the Hebrew month of Nisan, which equates to late March or early April.
Sir Isaac Newton was one of the first to use the Hebrew lunar calendar to come up with firm dates for Good Friday: Friday 7 April 30 AD or Friday 3 April, 33 AD, with Easter Day falling two days later. Modern scholars continue to think these the most likely.
Most people will tell you that Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox, which is broadly true. But the precise calculations are complicated and involve something called an ‘ecclesiastical full moon’, which is not the same as the moon in the sky. The earliest possible date for Easter in the West is 22 March, which last fell in 1818 and won’t fall again until 2285. The latest is 25 April, which last happened in 1943 and is next due in 2038.
Why the name, ‘Easter’?
In almost every European language, the festival’s name comes from ‘Pesach’, the Hebrew word for Passover. The Germanic word ‘Easter’, however, seems to come from Eostre, a Saxon fertility goddess mentioned by the Venerable Bede. He thought that the Saxons worshipped her in ‘Eostur month’, but may have confused her with the classical dawn goddesses like Eos and Aurora, whose names mean ‘shining in the east’. So Easter might have meant simply ‘beginning month’ – a good time for starting up again after a long winter.
Why Eggs?
On one hand, they are an ancient symbol of fertility in most European cultures. On the other hand, hens start laying regularly again each Spring. Since eggs were forbidden during Lent, it’s easy to see how decorating and eating them became a practical way to celebrate Easter.
In the UK and Europe, the earliest Easter eggs were painted and decorated hen, duck or goose eggs, a practice still carried on in many parts of the world today. As time went by, artificial eggs were made and by the end of the 17th century, manufactured eggs made of various materials were available for purchase at Easter, for giving as Easter gifts and presents.
Easter eggs continued to evolve through the 18th and into the 19th Century, with hollow cardboard eggs filled with gifts and sumptuously decorated, culminating in the ultimate in Easter eggs, the fabulous Faberge Eggs. Encrusted with jewels, they were made for the Czar’s of Russia by Carl Faberge, a French jeweller, surely these were the ‘ultimate’ Easter gift, to buy even a small one now would make you poorer by several millions of pounds sterling.
Why Chocolate Eggs?
It was at about this time (early 1800’s) that the first chocolate Easter eggs appeared in Germany and France and soon spread to the rest of Europe and beyond. The first chocolate eggs were solid and they were soon followed by hollow eggs. Making hollow eggs at that time was no mean feat, because the easily worked chocolate we use today didn’t exist then, they had to use a crude paste made from ground roasted Cacao beans.
By the turn of the 19th Century, the discovery of the modern chocolate making process and improved mass manufacturing methods meant that the hollow, moulded Chocolate Easter Egg was fast becoming the Easter gift of choice in the UK and many parts of Europe, and by the 1960’s it was well established worldwide.
[from Parish Pump and other sources]
Why Easter ? Why now? Why eggs?