Why The Easter Bunny Gives Out Chocolate Eggs

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Easter Bunnies and Hares

Why do we gift and eat chocolate eggs at Easter? What do Easter eggs have to do with bunnies? It’s worth exploring the tangled warren of different traditions that have us now celebrating Easter with chocolate bunnies and eggs.

Following the tale of ‘The Easter Bunny’ involves going down a rabbit warren of different traditions that came together in late 17th century Germany with the first “Easter Hare” before this was combined with chocolate eggs in the late 19th Century.

• The link between rabbits, spring, fertility and the ‘rebirth’ of Easter is relatively obvious given the way that rabbits are well known for breeding like, well, rabbits. And these ‘kittens’ are often born around Easter time (note: technically, and very confusingly, when baby rabbits are first born they are called kittens, not bunnies).
• The link between hares and Easter is less obvious. Hares have long been associated with the Virgin Mary as in Roman times it was (mistakenly) believed that hares were hermaphrodites and so could reproduce without sex. So in medieval church paintings and manuscripts hares were often used to symbolize the idea of the Virgin birth.
• The first record we have of an Easter Bunny (or to be exact, an Easter Hare) giving out eggs, dates back to 1682 where Georg Franck Von Frackenau describes a German Lutheran folk take of an Easter Hare bringing eggs for well behaved children. German immigrants to the US in the 1700s brought this tradition with them, and there are mentions in Pennsylvania diaries from the 1700s of an egg-laying hare (called the ‘Osterhase’) and children making nests for this hare to lay their anticipated Easter eggs.

And the link to eggs?

The next puzzle is why the Easter Bunny/Hare laid, and gave out, eggs. And here the history is also convoluted and requires a lot of disentangling:

• Along with rabbits, eggs have been used as fertility symbols since antiquity, and as early as the 1st century AD eggs were associated by the Christian Church with rebirth.
• In medieval times, eggs became one of the many foods that were prohibited during lent, in the run up to Easter. So before the start of Lent, parents would hand out eggs as special treats to children, and, rather like the origins of Boxing Day, children would go door to door asking for eggs before they started their Lenten fasts.
• These traditions were then combined with the ancient custom of decorating eggs (the earliest decorated eggs date back more than 60,000 years to Howieson Poort Shelter, a cave in South Africa). Over the centuries, different ways were found to colour eggs and use them as gifts, for example, court records detail how Edward I of England dyed over 450 eggs with onion skins to give to his court for Easter in 1290.
• During the 18th century, chocolate was added to the mix. Louis XIV used to give decorated ostrich eggs to his court favourites, and one of his chocolate cooks had the bright idea of replacing these ostrich eggs with chocolate moulded to look like ostrich eggs. And this was followed in Turin where a Mme. Giambone started filling empty chicken egg shells with molten chocolate in 1725.
• It took the UK some time to catch up. The Victorians started to give out chocolate for Easter, but it wasn’t until 1873 that J.S. Fry & Sons claim to have launched the first British Chocolate Easter egg in 1873, closely followed by Cadbury in 1875.
• Today these different themes of eggs, chocolate, bunnies and hares have been conflated and combined to create an extravaganza of chocolate Easter bunnies, Easter eggs… and much else. It’s hard to obtain exact numbers but estimates of the UK gifting over 80 million eggs are often quoted, and that doesn’t include Creme Eggs (Cadbury sells annually over 500 million of these, two thirds in the UK).