OK,
so Easter is over now, the bunny is gone and all you have left are some eggs.
But how did eggs get associated with Easter?
For
the answer you have to go back to the early rules of the Catholic Church, in
particular those surrounding the period of Lent. I wrote about some of the
prohibition of eating certain foods in the lead-up to Easter in my blog post of
January
27, 2015. Religious laws of both the Catholic and Protestant churches
actually came out of older Jewish practices. Eating flesh or meat products was
particularly forbidden during certain days although, in England in the 16th
and 17th centuries this had more to do with protecting the fishing
industry than religious reasons.
At
any rate, other products, such as eggs and milk were also on the list of foods
to be avoided because they came from animals whose flesh was also eaten. This
put the farmers in a bit of a bind because they could not stop the chickens
from laying eggs and, with no one to eat them, the stockpile grew.
Finally
at Easter, with eating prohibitions lifted, poultry owners could distribute the
eggs. With so many in abundance by that time, the price would have dropped
significantly. The answer was to just give them away, quickly, while they were
still reasonably fresh and edible. And so the tradition was established!
How
they got to be coloured is a whole other story which you can read about here
and here and here. And that
Easter Bunny? Check him out, along with the eggs, here and here.
 |
| Picture uploaded from Pinterest. |
Hope
you had a Happy Easter!
Wayne
Shepheard is a volunteer with the Online Parish Clerk program in
England, handling four parishes in Devon, England. He has
published a number of articles about various aspects of genealogy and is a past
Editor of Chinook, the quarterly
journal of the Alberta Family Histories Society. Wayne also provides
genealogical consulting services through his business, Family History Facilitated.
