Children love trying to find things. They look for hours through Eye Spy or Where’s Waldo books or play scavenger hunt or treasure hunt in the backyard collecting random objects just for the fun of finding them. But perhaps the greatest finding game of all is the age-old egg hunt on Easter.
The egg hunt is done using decorated eggs or the colorful plastic kind which may be filled with chocolates, coins, or even dollar bills for the spendthrift family. These eggs are then placed about the yard in obscure and well-hidden places, all the more hidden and obscure the more value that’s nestled inside. But why eggs on Easter exactly? The answer to that question may never be answered this side of the grave, but historians speculate that the Easter egg is of both pre-Christian and Christian origin.
Decorating eggs goes back thousands of years and eggs have always been associated with rebirth by many cultures. So it wasn’t a leap of meaning to make eggs a principle symbol of the Christian holiday of Easter. As sociologist Kenneth Thompson says in his book, Culture & Progress: Early Sociology of Culture, the Easter egg developed in the east.
“The use of eggs at Easter seems to have come from Persia into the Greek Christian Churches of Mesopotamia, thence to Russia and Siberia through the medium of Orthodox Christianity,” Thompson said. “From the Greek Church the custom was adopted by either the Roman Catholics or the Protestants and then spread through Europe.”
In his work, Easter and Paganism, Peter Gainsford believes that eggs became associated with Easter not in the east but in the west, predominately through the penitential practices of Lent during which Catholics of the Middle Ages would give up delectable food stuffs like dairy, meat, and, yes, eggs. When Easter Sunday arrived, the lenten fast would be broken along with a lot of eggs.
In The Catholic Weekly, Fr. John Flader suggests that the Easter egg is indeed from the east but settled in the west.
“It seems that as far back as the fourth century in the East eggs were blessed at Easter time,” writes Flader. “The Benedictio Ovorum, blessing of eggs, came to the West in the twelfth century, perhaps brought from the East by the Crusaders. In the East the eggs were stained red in memory of the blood Christ shed on the Cross.”
In one popular Orthodox legend, Saint Mary Magdalene, who was the first to discover the empty tomb on Sunday morning, was of patrician rank and so could seek an audience with the Roman Emperor Caesar. As the story goes, upon entering the halls of the emperor, she took up an egg from the royal table to argue a point about the resurrection of Christ but Caesar rebuked her, saying it were easier for the egg in her hand to turn red than for Christ to have risen from the dead. The egg turned red, and most likely Caesar’s face did, too.
Wherever the Easter egg came from, one thing seems to be certain, it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. And if the egg hunt isn’t quite enough egg fun, there is always egg rolling which, for over a century now, children have been doing on the White House lawn.
If rolling eggs down the lawn with a long-handled spoon isn’t your shtick, you can do as the Cajuns in Louisiana and pock (from French, paques, or Easter) your eggs with friends and family, which means going around cracking your egg (preferably stained beautiful) against your opponent’s egg. The winner (the one who doesn’t crack) eats all.
Whether you hide and hunt for them, roll them down a hill, knock them against a friend’s, or just eat them, eggs are an essential part of Easter celebrations, but why that is may not be fully understood until the day of the Resurrection.
