Deeper Meanings To the Easter Bunny
This weekend, billions around the world celebrate the Christian Easter holiday. In the U.S.(and other countries with similar traditions), millions of children will go to bed on this Saturday night before Easter with visions of the Easter Bunny coming to fill their baskets full of chocolate, sugars, and toys. Even in the third decade of the 21st century, it is still the case that 58% of children in the U.S. under 12 hold true to such fanciful folklore. How amazing, because such traditions touch on key parts of what is timeless and immeasurable.
One day as a youngling, about eight or so, I was playing in the barnyard of our Iowa family farm. All of a sudden I heard a rabbit scurry through the cement, past the open gate, onto the dirt path leading to the pasture beyond. “What a beautiful sight,” I thought. This was similar to the time a live deer ran through the yard when my siblings and I were playing or to other amazing scenes from Nature. At that moment I wondered how the Easter Bunny made its rounds throughout the year, watching the children throughout the world celebrating Easter and preparing like Santa did to visit homes come Easter Sunday morning.
Every year my siblings and I would get out our Easter baskets, barren and empty, and place them in the living room. Then we’d wake up on Easter morning to find them missing so we’d spend long periods of time searching around the house for them. And then we’d find them in the oddest of places — in some closet behind the coats, stocked away behind the piano, in the dining room windowsill — stocked full of small candies, large chocolates, and a new toy or two.
This had been the tradition of generations before for both our parents’ families. I remember my relative telling me the time they searched all the way down to the dark cellar’s laundry room, to find a full basket right behind the dryer.
And then of course about six months after that time playing on the farm, my parents told me the truth that many of my classmates had already figured it out or been told. Santa Claus and the Easter bunny really aren’t physically real. The stories I had learned were fiction —elaborate folklore carried out on a larger cultural level. What exactly are the deeper meanings of the Easter Bunny or similar fantasical folklores? Could the practice of sharing these folklores be seen as negative or counterproductive in some sense? Or are the traditions and practices necessary for larger cultural and spiritual reasons?
With the Easter Bunny and similar tales, much of the deeper meanings can be tied to spring and existential cycles of renewal. When we think of the planet Earth’s seasons, a region’s winter is similar to the barren or hidden basket kids lay out for the bunny, when creatures go into hibernation or trees drop all leaves and store energy within for the cold season. And then when spring arives, all organic life “springs anew.” Trees are re-budding, flowers and other plants are slowly starting to rise from the ground, and creatures are migrating to warmer northern regions again. Nature’s bounty and beauty is beyond measure or fathom, dwarfing even those stocks of candy and gifts flowing over the edge of each basket on Sunday morning.
It’s a natural occurrence for people of all ages to want to experience a sort of “being reborn.” Perhaps this rebirth is into a new chapter in their lives or into a newer better person. This Easter in Iowa, the spring days are getting warmer with bright and sunny skys(even though the mornings are still chilly and holding the memory of late-winter chills). The Easter holiday in mid April generally brings in spring full bloom for many parts of the world. Flowers start to rise, trees start to bloom, and every corner of the Earth seems to offer a new scent of Nature’s unbounded beauty.
Beyond fantasy folklore about a bunny that delivers candy in the dawn of spring, the new season brings perennial narratives from various religious traditions that speak to many of the deeper spiritual realities of existence — life passing to non-life and back to life again. Hinduism celebrates Rama Navami at the start of the spring season, marking birth and renewal. In the Bahai faith, Ridvan comes in later April celebrating founder Baháʼu’lláh’s realization that he was a manifestation of the Divine. And at the heart of the Christian narrative is the Easter message. Easter Sunday commerates the biblical Resurrection of Jesus after he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. For Christians, Jesus’s rising from the dead embodies the Divine’s perpetual triumph over death and evil for all. As Catholics and other Christian denominations have prepared for the holiday through the Lenten season of fasting and ritual, the weeks after Easter will become Christians’ ongoing Easter season, marking the narratives of Jesus’s dwelling with his followers after the Resurrection before the Ascension. Of course, we hardly scratch from the surface here relating a small part of Christianity’s vision, as well as innumerable other spiritual traditions.
So yeah, I guess the Easter bunny wasn’t physically real and present on our planet all of those Easter mornings we woke up. But certainly, adults everywhere from countless perspectives and backgrounds continue to place faith in the everlasting Divine realities of love, beauty, renewal, and rebirth at the heart of our lives and at the heart of everything.
