The History and Tradition of Easter Eggs

Easter is this Sunday, and with it, the annual the tradition of coloring, hiding, finding and gifting Easter eggs.  But where did this ritual come from, anyway?

 

Eggs have been associated with the Christian festival of Easter, which celebrates the death and resurrection of Christ, since the early days of the church. However, Christian customs connected with Easter eggs are to some extent adaptations of ancient pagan practices related to spring rites.  The egg has long been a symbol of ‘fertility’, ‘rebirth’ and ‘the beginning’. In Egyptian mythology, the phoenix burns its nest to be reborn later from the egg that is left; Hindu scriptures relate that the world developed from an egg.

 

“In pre-Christian days, eggs were associated with many different springtime rites,” says Lubow Wolynetz, curator of folk art at the Ukranian Museum in New York City and the Ukranian Museum and Library Stamford, CT. “Many scholars believe that Easter had its origins as an early Anglo-Saxon festival that celebrated the goddess Eastre, and the coming of spring, in a sense a resurrection of nature after winter,” Carole Levin, Professor of History and Director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program at the University of Nebraska.

 

“In Ukraine, for example, people were an agricultural society. A late or cold spring had an impact on crops, so people attempted to harness the power of the sun to bring about the resurrection of nature.”  And what reminds you of the sun? An egg with its bright yellow center and the life that springs from it,” says Wolynetz.  Many cultures throughout Europe embraced the idea that eggs had life-giving associations. In Ukraine, people began the practice of “writing” the eggs, called pysanky (from the word pysaty, meaning “to write”), adapted to pisanki in Poland. They adorned them with symbols such as the sun, a triangle, or lines that encircle the egg, a tradition that continues to this day.

 

In Ukranian and some Eastern European cultures, decorated eggs were kept in homes, given to friends, or even buried in the fields. It’s likely the idea was to connect to the “magic” of the egg to protect the family, banish evil, and insure spring’s return. With the rise of Christianity in the 10^th Century, “The people melded old and new traditions,” says Wolynetz.  The church adapted many pagan customs and the egg, as a symbol of new life, came to represent the Resurrection. Some Christians regarded the egg as a symbol for the stone being rolled from the sepulchre.

 

“Some Christian missionaries hoped that celebrating Christian holy days at the same times as pagan festivals would encourage conversion, especially if some of the symbols carried over,” says Levin.  An alternate Easter eggs story does stick with Christianity, but in that version the Eastern eggs may have been a matter of practicality. Back then, the rules for fasting during Lent were much stricter than they are today. Christians were not allowed to eat meat or any animal product — including cheese, milk, cream or eggs —so they hard-boiled the eggs their chickens would produce during that time, and stored them so they could distribute them later, according to Henry Kelly, a professor of medieval studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Because Lent ends in the lead-up to Easter, that “later” at which the eggs would be given out (often to the poor, who were unable to afford meat for their celebrations) would naturally happen right around the holiday.

 

But what about the tradition of dying Easter eggs for the Easter Bunny to hide for kids?

One of the earliest pieces of evidence of dyed eggs in British history goes back to 1290, when the household of Edward I bought 450 eggs to be colored or covered in gold leaf to be distributed among “the royal entourage” for Easter, according to Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, by Ronald Hutton, a history professor at the University of Bristol. The book also mentions that two centuries later, the Vatican sent Henry VIII an egg enclosed in a silver case as a “seasonal present.” Such objects were also known as “eggsilver.” (Today, the most famous ultra-decorated Easter eggs are the Fabergé eggs that were first presented to the Russian royal court in the late 19th century.)

 

Residents of 13th century English villages brought gifts of Easter eggs to their manorial lords every holiday, and eggs also became what people would give to the church as a special offering on Good Friday. There’s evidence that such eggs were colored, especially red, a color that signified “joy”, to be given as gifts in the 16th and 17th centuries, Levin adds, and residents of a southwestern area of Lancashire paid their “Easter dues” in these eggs up through the early 18th century even as the gentry switched to cash.

 

It was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that dyed Easter eggs became something to give to children rather than to the Church, the poor or to local authorities. The Victorian era was a notable time of change for ideas about family life, and Easter was among the many religious holidays that saw a shift toward family-friendliness, with an emphasis on rituals geared toward kids. The Victorian middle classes “had a fascination with old traditions,” says Anthony Aveni, author of The Book of the Year: A Brief History of Our Seasonal Holidays and a professor of Astronomy and Anthropology at Colgate University, so the Easter egg-dying tradition – like the idea of an “Easter Bunny” who delivers Easter eggs in baskets –   was a natural fit. Easter-egg hunts soon followed, and it was right around that time that the first White House Easter Egg Roll took place, in 1876.

 

Chocolate Easter eggs were first made in Europe in the early 19th century, with France and Germany taking the lead in this new artistic confectionery. Some early eggs were solid, as the technique for mass-producing moulded chocolate had not been devised. The production of the first hollow chocolate eggs must have been painstaking, as the moulds were lined with paste chocolate one at a time.  John Cadbury made his first ‘French eating Chocolate’ in 1842 but it was not until 1875 that the first Cadbury Easter Eggs were made. Progress in the chocolate Easter egg market was slow until a method was found for making the chocolate flow into the molds.

 

The modern chocolate Easter egg owes its progression to the two greatest developments in the history of chocolate – the Dutch invention of a press for separating cocoa butter from the cocoa bean in 1828 and the introduction of a pure cocoa by Cadbury Brothers in 1866. The Cadbury process made large quantities of cocoa butter available and this was the secret of making moulded chocolate or indeed, any fine eating chocolate.

 

The working classes began adopting these traditions in the first half of the 20th century as their wages increased a bit, allowing them to invest more in the holiday celebration. When Easter was incorporated into the official public holiday schedules so that workers would also get time off for the day, that “both enhanced the status of Easter and provided an incentive to find special things to do at it,” says Hutton.

 

By the end of the 20th century, Easter eggs could mean any hidden treat, and  today “Easter Eggs” are a term used in the tech world to mean hidden clues and information embedded in computer games, TV shows, movies and other such content — but the real deal, whether made of candy or actual eggs, continues to delight each year at Easter time.

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