For Easter: A Bit O’ Bio on the Bunny

After all, rabbits are renowned for reproducing

Having treated much of moveable feasts lately, including posts on Santa Claus/Christmas and April Fool’s Day and Carnival, it would seem to be indicated that one on the Pagan origins of Easter was in order as well.

Only with a bit of theological contortionism can any sense be made out of this hybrid holiday. It does work thematically but it may not be obvious to some, and of course most people never ask any questions at all. The common thread among Christ’s resurrection and Springtime imagery (bunnies, chicks, eggs) being rebirth and renewal, naturally. For us in the English speaking world, it’s baked right into our name for the holiday, which is called by myriad other names in other countries. The etymological root is the same for the compass direction…East, towards the dawn, the light, the start of a new day. Prior to the holiday’s being harnessed to Christianity it was a feast in honor of an Anglo-Saxon Goddess named Ēostre, who was associated with Spring, hares and eggs. This was attested by the Venerable Bede. The philology (the roots of the name) was worked out by Jacob Grimm of the Brothers Grimm, and others. German Lutherans (Pennsylvania Dutch) are said to have brought the tradition of the egg-bearing bunny to the U.S. in the 18th century, where it became Americanized in much the same way as Santa Claus.

As a child, this holiday never held the same magic for me as did Christmas, Halloween, or the 4th of July, the other seasonal holidays celebrated in America. After all, compared with the others, the rewards are oddly limited, restricted to a handful of strange items. Christmas is about ALL the toys; Halloween is about ALL the candy; and the 4th usually came with the best cook-out of the year, outdoor recreation, sometimes a band concert, and fireworks. Easter came with: a long church service on a warm day! Lessons about crucifixion and death! An outdoor treasure hunt in your best clothes that you shouldn’t get dirty! One or two kinds of very specific candy! And all the hard-boiled eggs a child could ever wish for! In time though I’ve come to appreciate it. I have come to regard it as a holiday best appreciated by older people. After all, all of this contemplation of babies…that’s really not for the babies themselves.

As it happens I have a personal connection to this holiday’s mascot that elevated for me as a child, still and all. As I wrote here, I’m related to Harrison Cady, who illustrated Thornton Burgess’s Peter Rabbit stories of the 1910s through the 1950s, and both wrote and drew the comic strip based on from the ’20s through the ’40s. (It’s an entirely different Peter Rabbit character from Beatrix Potter’s). It was Burgess who coined the name “Peter Cottontail” for a story in which the Rabbit had gotten dissatisfied with the more quotidian surname of Rabbit. In 1949, the songwriting team of Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson hitched the character to Easter with the song “Here Comes Peter Cottontail”, which then became a hit for Gene Autry, whose other holiday hits included their “Frosty the Snowman” as well as “Here Comes Santa Claus” and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer”.

Rankin-Bass made holiday specials out of all of these songs. Their Easter special Here Comes Peter Cottontail debuted in 1971. The plot however was taken not from the Burgess-Cady books, which weren’t about Easter, but from The Easter Bunny That Overslept by Priscilla and Otto Friedrich. Those Germans and their Easter Bunnies! Anyway the show premiered when I was five years old, so it was a big deal and that’s around the time I learned of the Cady relation. The special starred Casey Kasem as the title character, Danny Kaye as the narrator and various other characters, Vincent Price as the villain January Q. Irontail, with Paul Frees,Joan Gardner, and Iris Rainer and others, providing other voices. In 1977 they followed up with The Easter Bunny is Coming to Town, with Fred Astaire,Bob McFadden,Allen Swift, et al.

For my complete post on the full panoply of rabbit characters of stage, screen and literature go here!

Anyway, here’s a photo of me and E.B. from when I was simultaneously too old and too young for Easter. It may not look like it, but there was an unfortunate person in that costume.