ONE of my first challenges when my family and I arrived in Malaysia in the year 2000 was to find Easter decorations and chocolate bunnies in stores. After having been very pleasantly surprised by the sheer abundance of Christmas-themed offerings just a few months earlier, I remember it being somewhat sobering to realise that Easter had not yet reached the shores of our new home away from home.
My children were very small in 2000. Small enough to still believe in the magic of the Easter Bunny, but also too young to understand a rational explanation about different cultures and the impact of commerce versus traditions.
Not a problem, I thought at first. They were also young enough to still enjoy another important tradition — home crafted decorations. In the flagrant absence of store-bought options, we were going to make our own. A brilliant idea, until I realised that not only were the supermarkets going to thwart my plans, but the local chickens were out to get me, too. Never before had I spent any thought on the fact that Malaysian chickens produce, for the large part, brown eggs.
Feverish phone calls to friends and acquaintances ensued but nobody seemed to have any valuable tips to share. Easter was not going to happen that year. Until my husband saved the day by ways of hunting down at least one, exorbitantly expensive chocolate bunny in the coffee shop of a five-star hotel downtown. The little guy was so expensive, and pretty, that we simply couldn’t break off his sweet little ears and eat him, as the custom would demand.
But, why do we even have an appetite for sweet little bunnies at Easter? And why (my son’s favourite question at the time), why does this bunny bring us colourful eggs? Where does the bunny get these eggs? Rabbits don’t lay eggs, and the poor, overworked hens that lay all these Easter goodies aren’t even part of the traditional Easter celebration. Some dedicated feminist might see an obvious correlation here.
If one follows scripture by the letter (no pun intended), Easter is the highest holiday in the Christian calendar. Christmas commemorates the birth of Christ, certainly important, but not exactly an exceptional feat in and of itself; everybody has done that, one could argue. Easter, on the other hand, celebrates his resurrection. Now, that is pretty unique, thus the higher holiday.
Early missionaries spreading the Christian faith in Europe found the pagan population celebrating springtime as a new beginning, as the end of the dark, cold and often deadly time of the year. Their festivities were ones of hope, of life, and with it, of fertility — for plants, for livestock and for their own parental ambitions. Today’s secular symbols of eggs and bunnies date back to these ancient communities, which, for obvious reasons, associated them with signs of fecundity and, thus, utilised them as offerings to their tutelary goddesses of family and fertility, Eostra and Freyja.
Said missionaries being skilful negotiators, they cleverly combined their new concepts of belief with old traditions and therefore achieved acceptance for the new faith without too much resistance from the pagan population.
Little did they know that, centuries later, the exportability of a holiday into yet another society would depend on these very same secular symbols, aka business propositions. What my children were too young to understand so many moons ago became painfully obvious to me. Christmas with its trees, Santas, tinsel, and most importantly boundless demand for gift shopping was a dream-come-true for virtually every branch of mercantilism. The commercial excess associated with the end-of- year holidays has been cultivated around the globe for quite some time.
How could a few measly chocolate bunnies and chicken eggs compete with the overbearing presence of the secular aspects of Christmas? One very astute businessman in the late 1800s however, almost succeeded in making the Easter egg the most iconic and prestigious symbol of them all. Between 1885 and 1917, the famed jeweller Peter Carl Fabergé designed up to 69 so called “Imperial Eggs”, which had been commissioned first by the Russian Tsar Alexander III as an Easter gift for his wife Maria Fedorovna, and later by his son Tsar Nicholas II for both this mother the Dowager Empress Maria as well as for his wife the tsaritsa, Empress Alexandra Fedorovna.
All 43 jewelled Fabergé eggs still in existence today are either exhibited in museums or hiding in very private collections around the world.
My children don’t believe in the Easter bunny any longer, but that is not to say that they would want to miss out on all the chocolate, the candy and other Easter-themed treats that have finally found their way into the aisles of our local supermarkets. If only the hens could be convinced to play along and lay white eggs for a week or two each year.