The Ears Are Always the First to Go

Though Easter was a few weeks ago, our dining room table is still cluttered with Easter baskets, boxes of stale Peeps, and plastic eggs.

We're not big on religion. In fact, we celebrate more for the candy than anything else. It also gives us an excuse to dress up in our best pastels.

I never really questioned the correlation between Easter and rabbits. I just took for granted they always lived hand in hand, until I came across some information about the ritual's origins. Turns out, we have the Germans to thank for importing the Easter Bunny into American folklore. He first appeared on the scene during the 16th century, when it was written than if little boys and girls made nests out of their caps and bonnets, the Easter Bunny would fill them with colored eggs.

The word, Easter, comes from the term Ostara, which is the name of the Spring equinox, and it's been documented, too, by the Venerable Bede that Easter comes from Eostre--the Germanic goddess of Spring.

This little lesson reminds me of one of the funniest essays I'd ever read by David Sedaris in his book Me Talk Pretty One Day. The essay is written about taking a French language class in Paris with students from various parts of the world. When it's time to explain Easter, each student, save for the Moroccan, who'd never heard of the holiday, jumps in to provide details. What makes this essay so pee-in-your-pants funny is the way in which Sedaris translates their awful attempt at French into English:

The Italian nanny was attempting to answer the teacher's latest question when the Moroccan student interrupted, shouting, "Excuse me, but what's an Easter?"

It would seem that despite having grown up in a Muslim country, she would have heard it mentioned once or twice, but no. "I mean it," she said. "I have no idea what you people are talking about."

The teacher called on the rest of us to explain.

The Poles led the charge to the best of their ability. "It is," said one, "a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus...oh shit." She faltered and her fellow country-man came to her aid.

"He call his self Jesus and then he be die one day on two...morsels of...lumber."

The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.

"He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your father."

"He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples."

"He nice, the Jesus."

"He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today."

Part of the problem had to do with vocabulary. Simple nouns such as cross and resurrection were beyond our grasp, let alone such a complicated refexive phrases as "to give of yourself your only begotten son." Faced with the challenge of explaining the cornerstone of Christianity, we did what any self-respecting group of people might do. We talked about food instead.

"Easter is a party for to eat of the lamb," the Italian nanny explained. "One too may eat of the chocolate."


The essay goes on further about explaining who brings said chocolate. But when a dispute between the American version of a rabbit delivering the candy versus the French version of a bell flying in from Rome, it raises the question of why would the French have a bell? And further, why would it fly in from Rome when it would be so much easier to use a bell from Paris?

Curiosity got the better of me and so I looked up the origin of the Bell Theory. Turns out, the bell has a little more Christianity tied to it than our American counterpart. According to legend, all bells cease to ring on the Thursday before Good Friday, to mark the death of Christ. On Easter Sunday, the bells ring again to mark his resurrection. Apparently one of the bells goes to visit the Pope in Rome, who gives him (him?) a bunch of colored eggs to take back with him. So the bell returns to France and scatters the eggs everywhere for people to find.

Personally, I'm siding with Sedaris who argues that the Easter Bunny is, at least, a character, where a bell "has all the personality of a cast-iron skillet."

Without the Easter Bunny, there'd be no chocolate rabbits; and without chocolate rabbits, there'd be no rabbit ears; and everyone knows, that's the best part.