Easter Trivia! Who Knew?

While Easter celebrates the resurrection of Jesus and His victory over death and thus is one of the most important Christian festivals it’s also a popular non-religious holiday rejoicing the onset of spring, after cold and chilly winters.   Markets are flooded with colorful eggs, bunnies, marshmallow chicks and spring flowers. Around ninety million chocolate bunnies are produced for Easter each year and every day about five million marshmallow chicks and bunnies are made in preparation for the festival so there is nothing trivial about this collection of Easter Trivia!

Easter has been named after Eastre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess. The symbols of the goddess were the hare and the egg.

• Apart from English and German, the name of 'Easter' has been derived from Pesach, the Hebrew name of Passover festival.
• Right from ancient times, egg has been regarded as a symbol of rebirth in most of the cultures.
• The customary act of painting eggs is known as Pysanka.
• Just like Passover which is dependent on the phases of the moon and has different dates each year, Easter is also a movable feast.
•  The first Easter basket was given the appearance of a bird's nest.
• Chocolate eggs were made for the first time in Europe, in the 19th century. Till date, they remain one of the favorite Easter treats.
• Easter is the top-selling confectionery holiday in the west, second only to Halloween.
• On Easter, 76% people bite off the chocolate bunny ears first, while 5% bite the feet first and 4% eat the tail first.
• The custom of giving eggs at Easter dates back to the time of the Egyptians, Persians, Gauls, Greeks and Romans.
• As per the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest Easter egg made till date, was just over 25-ft high and was made of chocolate and marshmallow. Weighing at 8,968 lbs., the egg was supported by an internal steel frame.
• Red jellybeans qualify as the most favorite food stuff for kids on Easter.
• Egyptians were initially the ones who exchanged eggs to symbolize the resurrection of Christ. It was later that the tradition was passed down to early Christians. .
• In the mid-20th century, it used to take as much as 27 hours to make a marshmallow peep. Today, the time has been reduced to six minutes.
•   (http://easter.fundootimes.com/easter-trivia.html)