The Tale of the Real Easter Bunny

Happy Easter! 

On Easter Sunday, it is estimated that over 80 million chocolate Easter Eggs are given (and eaten) each year in the UK.

The custom of giving eggs during springtime has been tradition for thousands of years. Long before Christianity, people painted eggs bright colours and gave them as gifts, celebrating new life and the vibrant colours of spring. The custom continued within Christianity with eggs being a treat following lent fasting.

In rural Britain, ground nesting birds such as the lapwing lay their eggs in shallow nests in open grassy fields, sharing the habitat with hares, who create 'forms' in which they nest and have their young.

In years gone by people would walk across the fields, and find nests of eggs, and see hares racing away and assume that it was the hares that had laid the eggs as the lapwings would have flown away! Hence the tale of the Easter bunny leaving eggs, is in fact a hare. 

Here on our Elmore rewilding land we have both hare and lapwing, and whilst seeing a hare is quite rare as they are so secretive, you can often hear the lapwing with their distinctive "peewit" call. 

But how did the Easter hare become an Easter Bunny? Quite simply, we went from being a Pagan society to a Christian one. The secretive and mystical hare is the symbol of Ostara, the Pagan celebration of the Spring Equinox, also representing fertility and rebirth as well as abundance.

In the UK when Christianity became dominant all traces of Ostara and Pagan culture was erased, thus the hare became its nearest counterpart, the bunny. This legend was further upheld by the story of Ēostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, who supposedly rescued a bird from a tree by turning it into a hare which continued to lay eggs.

We love all these wonderful tales and folklore surrounding hares, and adore catching glimpses of them here at Elmore. We certainly believe in the Easter bunny!