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Happy Easter y’all! It's like Christmas if it didn't have all the hype, which is kind of odd because historically, Easter was a much more important holiday. After all, the central tenet of Christianity is this idea that my man JC was strung up and then supposedly rose again as a sign of his divinity. Like yeah, the whole virgin birth thing is a neat piece of lore, but it doesn't really add anything to the actual gist of the religion, does it? I guess to be fair, that's primarily from a secular standpoint. Christmas has long sort of outgrown its religious context since the 19th century. Like most birthdays, Christmas lends itself well to being mass marketed as a day of unbridled capitalism and getting drunk off your ass. In Christian circles, however, Easter is still the bigger celebration. I remember back when my mom used to drag me to church, the festivities around Easter were always noticeably much more revelrous than Christmas. Meanwhile, my impatient ass just wanted to get home, escape that suffocating boy suit, and dig into whatever candy the magical rabbit brought me the previous night.

Now, when you think about it, that last sentence sounds like it comes the fuck out of nowhere. Sure, as a culture, we all recognize the Easter Bunny and his routine of ripping off Santa’s shtick, delivering baskets full of Easter joy, and hiding very environmentally unfriendly eggs full of goodies for all the human larvae to fetch, but what the hell does any of that actually have to do with Easter? As far as I'm aware, my man JC doesn't lay eggs. I mean maybe he does idk I guess I can't prove that he doesn't lay eggs. Regardless, there isn't exactly any Bible passage we could point to which would suggest there's some horrifying sentient rabbit burglar out there either.

In fact, the Easter Bunny doesn't seem to have any origins in a religious context at all. No, not even a pagan one. You'll see it tossed around a lot online that there was an Anglo-Saxon spring goddess named Eostre whose symbol or companion was an egg-laying hare. However, while there was a goddess Eostre, and indeed her name is the source of our English word for the holiday which everyone else calls some cognate of Pesach, that's literally all we know about her. Her existence is only attested in a single hand-wavey paragraph from the 8th century writings of the Venerable Bede, and he only brings her up to explain the etymology. No mythological details are provided, and no animals are mentioned in association with her. The idea that the rabbit was her sacred animal is entirely the speculation of 19th century linguist Jacob Grimm and his successors who got the ball rolling on that whole “Christians must've just stolen everything from the pagans” trend that y’all know I'm not a fan of. I'll probably do a whole sheet for Eostre some time in the future because frankly that's an entire can of worms and it's a little beyond the scope of this blurb.

Interestingly, Easter eggs seem to predate the Bunny. Exact dates are hard to come by because egg painting is such a niche practice and the shells don't exactly preserve well in the archaeological record. I've seen it claimed that the first Christians in Mesopotamia adopted the practice from a Zoroastrian New Year tradition way back in the 1st century CE, though the furthest back I could source this claim was a 1694 publication by Thomas Hyde which… doesn't seem to have an English translation available… so, grain of salt there. A Library of Congress article by Stephanie Hall, meanwhile, supposes that the Easter egg is derivative of the hard-boiled egg commonly found on Passover seder plates to this day. Early Christians dyed these eggs a deep red to symbolize the blood of Christ. Greek-speaking churches continue this tradition to this day, linking their “kokkina avga” to legends of Mary Magdalene witnessing her eggs magically turn red as evidence of the divinity of Christ.

For less monochromatic eggs, we have to turn to Eastern Europe. Archeological remains are, again, pretty skant, though the earliest example of an egg specifically waxed for the purposes of painting seems to be a 10th century find from the Polish village of Ostrówek. Given how that's right around the cusp of the region's Christianization, it's possible that these “pysanky” eggs may have some kind of a pre-Christian origin, but that's entirely speculation. Either way, by the time they first get a written mention in the 13th century Chronica Polonorum, they've clearly become entirely absorbed into a Christian context similar to the red eggs of Greece. Since eggs are a pretty straightforward metaphor for new life and rebirth, it's easy to see how the tradition slowly caught on across the rest of Europe from these two sources.

What's less obvious is how an entirely placental mammal came to be the one shitting these tacky ornaments out. Again, it's not a pagan thing. In 1874, Eostre-truther Adolf Holtzmann theorized that the Easter Bunny must've originally been a bird, and at some point, for whatever reason, people started conceptualizing it as a hare instead. Just under a decade later, German author K.A. Oberle mistook Holtzmann's wording to extrapolate a story wherein the goddess Eostre actively transformed the bird into a hare, despite no such myth (or any myth) about Eostre ever existing. Instead, the oldest recorded reference to the Easter Bunny (or “Oster-Hase” in German) comes to us courtesy of physician Georg Franck von Franckenau, who published De Ovis Paschalibus (“On Easter Eggs”) in 1682. Here, von Franckenau explains that in the regions of Alsace and Westphalia, there's a folk custom where children are told the Oster-Hase has laid eggs for them to collect in the garden as a fun little game. The translated snippets I've managed to find online make zero attempt to decry this practice as some sort of pagan holdover, and right from the start it's clearly seen as a fairy tale consciously made up for kids just as it's understood today. And… that's really it, honestly. The Easter Bunny tradition just kind of emerges in a recognizable form right there in 1682, and he's been sneaking eggs into our homes for almost four centuries since. There's not really any lore or historical mystery to untangle. I realize that's kind of lame and underwhelming compared to the whole Eostre angle, but I honestly think the Easter Bunny and his egg hunts probably just started off as one of those dumb local church group activities some German peasant made up on the fly to give her kids something fun to do, and then by pure chance it became popular enough in the right regions at the right time to get spread around and eventually brought to the Americas in the 18th century, ultimately guaranteeing its widespread adoption by the immigrant populations who would create the United States, and by extension the world. I'm sure the nameless mom who first came up with it is very proud.

Alright, I'll add one more appendix just to satiate my own curiosity. You'll notice that unlike Santa, the Easter Bunny doesn't really have any “lore”. He doesn't even have a proper name. Hell, it's a little nebulous as to whether or not he's one individual rabbit or if “Easter Bunny” is a title that can be shared or passed down. In my head, I always assumed his name was Peter Cottontail because of that earworm written by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins in 1949 and featured in that weird 1971 stop-motion film. As you can see, though, those are pretty recent developments. Apparently that film was based on a 1957 children's book by Otto and Priscilla Friedrich titled The Easter Bunny that Overslept, which is about… well… an Easter Bunny who overslept, forcing him to try and give away his eggs on other holidays, only to fail because frankly Easter is the only day of the year where someone could offer you an egg in these trying times and you wouldn't be like “uhhhh… thanks?” The film's Easter Bunny is named Peter Cottontail, but that's an identification only made by the 1949 song. Before that, “Peter Cottontail” was just a byword for any generic fantasy rabbit, made popular by American naturalist Thornton W. Burgess's 1917 book The Adventures of Peter Cottontail, though funnily enough, that's not even the bunny’s real name in-universe. His original name was “Peter Rabbit”, ripped off directly from the character created by English author Beatrix Potter back in 1901, because apparently the young son Burgess was writing for was dead set on calling the rabbit protagonist in Burgess's story “Peter”. Burgess's rabbit changes his name to “Peter Cottontail” because the character feels his birth name is too basic, which sounds like it would've been a funny way to subvert the copyright if it weren't for the fact that he decides to switch back to Peter Rabbit by the end of the story. For what it's worth, Burgess did openly credit Potter for the name, though Potter, understandably, was pretty nonplussed about this and the other Peters that were popping up in the wake of her publication, once growling that “all rabbits are called Peter, now”. I imagine some of that resignation came from the fact that she'd taken the name from her own pet rabbit whom she had a deep personal connection with, but this was pre-Disney copyright law and her publishers hadn't bothered to file copyright in the US anyways, so there wasn't really anything she could do about it. That sucks, but as far as I can tell, both Peter Rabbits coexisted without any real harm in the other's profits, and both books are in the public domain now anyways, so I guess it all worked out in the end. I… wouldn't advise trying to pull something like that in the modern day, though. Like, the Mouse may have joined the rabbit in the public domain, but you bet your ass I'm too fucking scared to touch that with a hundred foot pole.

Design notes, I'm not sure if it's just the art block, but this ended up being more challenging than I expected it to be. The image of the Easter Bunny is a lot more nebulous than Santa is in our collective consciousness. Normally I like to pull from the earliest depictions in the historical record, but more vintage illustrations usually just slap a wicker basket on the back of a regular ass rabbit and call it a day. The oldest drawing of this character period seems to be by German-American artist Johann Conrad Gilbert, circa 1800, which depicts the Easter Bunny as this weird golden scaled dragon rabbit… thing. I couldn't find an explanation as to what's going on there, but I did at least grab some of Gilbert's design elements for the basket. I found my footing (ha) for the rest of the outfit by referencing the special Easter edition covers Puck Magazine published around the turn of the 20th century, adding in my own embellishments here and there for some extra Easter-egg-esk flair. For the coloration of the Bunny himself, I more or less just went with the simple shades Beatrix Potter used for her illustrations of Peter Rabbit, cause real rabbits tend to have kinda splotchy fur and I was just too tired to be bothered- I think this ended up being a perfectly serviceable Easter Bunny, and in some ways that kind of annoys me. Like it feels like there's probably a lot more room to experiment more creatively with this character somewhere, I just couldn't make the connections that'd get me there. Or maybe I'm just being too hard on myself, idk. Maybe I'll hop back down the bunny trail next year. Until then, I hope y’all have a good Sunday, and that Peter Cottontail makes your Easter bright and gay~

Description
Happy Easter y’all! It's like Christmas if it didn't have all the hype, which is kind of odd because historically, Easter was a much more important holiday. After all, the central tenet of Christianity is this idea that my man JC was strung up and then supposedly rose again as a sign of his divinity. Like yeah, the whole virgin birth thing is a neat piece of lore, but it doesn't really add anything to the actual gist of the religion, does it? I guess to be fair, that's primarily from a secular standpoint. Christmas has long sort of outgrown its religious context since the 19th century. Like most birthdays, Christmas lends itself well to being mass marketed as a day of unbridled capitalism and getting drunk off your ass. In Christian circles, however, Easter is still the bigger celebration. I remember back when my mom used to drag me to church, the festivities around Easter were always noticeably much more revelrous than Christmas. Meanwhile, my impatient ass just wanted to get home, escape that suffocating boy suit, and dig into whatever candy the magical rabbit brought me the previous night.

Now, when you think about it, that last sentence sounds like it comes the fuck out of nowhere. Sure, as a culture, we all recognize the Easter Bunny and his routine of ripping off Santa’s shtick, delivering baskets full of Easter joy, and hiding very environmentally unfriendly eggs full of goodies for all the human larvae to fetch, but what the hell does any of that actually have to do with Easter? As far as I'm aware, my man JC doesn't lay eggs. I mean maybe he does idk I guess I can't prove that he doesn't lay eggs. Regardless, there isn't exactly any Bible passage we could point to which would suggest there's some horrifying sentient rabbit burglar out there either.

In fact, the Easter Bunny doesn't seem to have any origins in a religious context at all. No, not even a pagan one. You'll see it tossed around a lot online that there was an Anglo-Saxon spring goddess named Eostre whose symbol or companion was an egg-laying hare. However, while there was a goddess Eostre, and indeed her name is the source of our English word for the holiday which everyone else calls some cognate of Pesach, that's literally all we know about her. Her existence is only attested in a single hand-wavey paragraph from the 8th century writings of the Venerable Bede, and he only brings her up to explain the etymology. No mythological details are provided, and no animals are mentioned in association with her. The idea that the rabbit was her sacred animal is entirely the speculation of 19th century linguist Jacob Grimm and his successors who got the ball rolling on that whole “Christians must've just stolen everything from the pagans” trend that y’all know I'm not a fan of. I'll probably do a whole sheet for Eostre some time in the future because frankly that's an entire can of worms and it's a little beyond the scope of this blurb.

Interestingly, Easter eggs seem to predate the Bunny. Exact dates are hard to come by because egg painting is such a niche practice and the shells don't exactly preserve well in the archaeological record. I've seen it claimed that the first Christians in Mesopotamia adopted the practice from a Zoroastrian New Year tradition way back in the 1st century CE, though the furthest back I could source this claim was a 1694 publication by Thomas Hyde which… doesn't seem to have an English translation available… so, grain of salt there. A Library of Congress article by Stephanie Hall, meanwhile, supposes that the Easter egg is derivative of the hard-boiled egg commonly found on Passover seder plates to this day. Early Christians dyed these eggs a deep red to symbolize the blood of Christ. Greek-speaking churches continue this tradition to this day, linking their “kokkina avga” to legends of Mary Magdalene witnessing her eggs magically turn red as evidence of the divinity of Christ.

For less monochromatic eggs, we have to turn to Eastern Europe. Archeological remains are, again, pretty skant, though the earliest example of an egg specifically waxed for the purposes of painting seems to be a 10th century find from the Polish village of Ostrówek. Given how that's right around the cusp of the region's Christianization, it's possible that these “pysanky” eggs may have some kind of a pre-Christian origin, but that's entirely speculation. Either way, by the time they first get a written mention in the 13th century Chronica Polonorum, they've clearly become entirely absorbed into a Christian context similar to the red eggs of Greece. Since eggs are a pretty straightforward metaphor for new life and rebirth, it's easy to see how the tradition slowly caught on across the rest of Europe from these two sources.

What's less obvious is how an entirely placental mammal came to be the one shitting these tacky ornaments out. Again, it's not a pagan thing. In 1874, Eostre-truther Adolf Holtzmann theorized that the Easter Bunny must've originally been a bird, and at some point, for whatever reason, people started conceptualizing it as a hare instead. Just under a decade later, German author K.A. Oberle mistook Holtzmann's wording to extrapolate a story wherein the goddess Eostre actively transformed the bird into a hare, despite no such myth (or any myth) about Eostre ever existing. Instead, the oldest recorded reference to the Easter Bunny (or “Oster-Hase” in German) comes to us courtesy of physician Georg Franck von Franckenau, who published De Ovis Paschalibus (“On Easter Eggs”) in 1682. Here, von Franckenau explains that in the regions of Alsace and Westphalia, there's a folk custom where children are told the Oster-Hase has laid eggs for them to collect in the garden as a fun little game. The translated snippets I've managed to find online make zero attempt to decry this practice as some sort of pagan holdover, and right from the start it's clearly seen as a fairy tale consciously made up for kids just as it's understood today. And… that's really it, honestly. The Easter Bunny tradition just kind of emerges in a recognizable form right there in 1682, and he's been sneaking eggs into our homes for almost four centuries since. There's not really any lore or historical mystery to untangle. I realize that's kind of lame and underwhelming compared to the whole Eostre angle, but I honestly think the Easter Bunny and his egg hunts probably just started off as one of those dumb local church group activities some German peasant made up on the fly to give her kids something fun to do, and then by pure chance it became popular enough in the right regions at the right time to get spread around and eventually brought to the Americas in the 18th century, ultimately guaranteeing its widespread adoption by the immigrant populations who would create the United States, and by extension the world. I'm sure the nameless mom who first came up with it is very proud.

Alright, I'll add one more appendix just to satiate my own curiosity. You'll notice that unlike Santa, the Easter Bunny doesn't really have any “lore”. He doesn't even have a proper name. Hell, it's a little nebulous as to whether or not he's one individual rabbit or if “Easter Bunny” is a title that can be shared or passed down. In my head, I always assumed his name was Peter Cottontail because of that earworm written by Steve Nelson and Jack Rollins in 1949 and featured in that weird 1971 stop-motion film. As you can see, though, those are pretty recent developments. Apparently that film was based on a 1957 children's book by Otto and Priscilla Friedrich titled The Easter Bunny that Overslept, which is about… well… an Easter Bunny who overslept, forcing him to try and give away his eggs on other holidays, only to fail because frankly Easter is the only day of the year where someone could offer you an egg in these trying times and you wouldn't be like “uhhhh… thanks?” The film's Easter Bunny is named Peter Cottontail, but that's an identification only made by the 1949 song. Before that, “Peter Cottontail” was just a byword for any generic fantasy rabbit, made popular by American naturalist Thornton W. Burgess's 1917 book The Adventures of Peter Cottontail, though funnily enough, that's not even the bunny’s real name in-universe. His original name was “Peter Rabbit”, ripped off directly from the character created by English author Beatrix Potter back in 1901, because apparently the young son Burgess was writing for was dead set on calling the rabbit protagonist in Burgess's story “Peter”. Burgess's rabbit changes his name to “Peter Cottontail” because the character feels his birth name is too basic, which sounds like it would've been a funny way to subvert the copyright if it weren't for the fact that he decides to switch back to Peter Rabbit by the end of the story. For what it's worth, Burgess did openly credit Potter for the name, though Potter, understandably, was pretty nonplussed about this and the other Peters that were popping up in the wake of her publication, once growling that “all rabbits are called Peter, now”. I imagine some of that resignation came from the fact that she'd taken the name from her own pet rabbit whom she had a deep personal connection with, but this was pre-Disney copyright law and her publishers hadn't bothered to file copyright in the US anyways, so there wasn't really anything she could do about it. That sucks, but as far as I can tell, both Peter Rabbits coexisted without any real harm in the other's profits, and both books are in the public domain now anyways, so I guess it all worked out in the end. I… wouldn't advise trying to pull something like that in the modern day, though. Like, the Mouse may have joined the rabbit in the public domain, but you bet your ass I'm too fucking scared to touch that with a hundred foot pole.

Design notes, I'm not sure if it's just the art block, but this ended up being more challenging than I expected it to be. The image of the Easter Bunny is a lot more nebulous than Santa is in our collective consciousness. Normally I like to pull from the earliest depictions in the historical record, but more vintage illustrations usually just slap a wicker basket on the back of a regular ass rabbit and call it a day. The oldest drawing of this character period seems to be by German-American artist Johann Conrad Gilbert, circa 1800, which depicts the Easter Bunny as this weird golden scaled dragon rabbit… thing. I couldn't find an explanation as to what's going on there, but I did at least grab some of Gilbert's design elements for the basket. I found my footing (ha) for the rest of the outfit by referencing the special Easter edition covers Puck Magazine published around the turn of the 20th century, adding in my own embellishments here and there for some extra Easter-egg-esk flair. For the coloration of the Bunny himself, I more or less just went with the simple shades Beatrix Potter used for her illustrations of Peter Rabbit, cause real rabbits tend to have kinda splotchy fur and I was just too tired to be bothered- I think this ended up being a perfectly serviceable Easter Bunny, and in some ways that kind of annoys me. Like it feels like there's probably a lot more room to experiment more creatively with this character somewhere, I just couldn't make the connections that'd get me there. Or maybe I'm just being too hard on myself, idk. Maybe I'll hop back down the bunny trail next year. Until then, I hope y’all have a good Sunday, and that Peter Cottontail makes your Easter bright and gay~