Easter

Easter Sunday, also called Resurrection Sunday, is a Christian observance celebrating the resurrection of Christ.

Easter is a time to invite family and friends for Sunday lunch and the most traditional dish is a lamb roast. Common decorations are dyed or painted eggs, little yellow chicks, bunnies and spring flowers, such as daffodils, lilies and tulips. The colors yellow or gold are usually associated with Easter, as these are the colours the Church of England uses for the Easter Sunday celebrations.
Why is it called Easter?
No one knows for sure where the English name Easter comes from. The most common explanation is that it is derived from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre. She was associated with spring and fertility and was celebrated around the vernal equinox. This theory was first introduced in the late-seventh-century by Bede (“The Venerable”), a historian from Anglo-Saxon England. In most
other languages, the name is derived from the Hebrew word Pesach, the Jewish holiday Passover.

Easter Worldwide
Many Christians worldwide celebrate Easter with special church services, music, candlelight, flowers and the ringing of church bells. Easter processions are held in some countries such as the Philippines and Spain. Many Christians view Easter as the greatest feast of the Church year. It is a day of joy and celebration to commemorate that Jesus Christ is risen, according to Christian belief.  Many towns and villages in Italy have sacred dramas about the episodes of the Easter story – these are held in the piazzas on Easter Day. Pastries called corona di nove are baked in the form of a crown. Other traditional foods include capretto (lamb) and agnello (kid/ goat). Easter in Poland is celebrated with family meals that include ham, sausages, salads, babka (a Polish cake) and mazurka, or sweet cakes filled with nuts, fruit and honey.

Chocolate eggs
The first chocolate Easter eggs were made in Europe in the early 19th century with France and Germany taking the lead. A type of eating chocolate had been invented a few years earlier but it could not be successfully moulded. Some early eggs were solid while the production of the first hollow chocolate eggs must have been rather painstaking as the moulds were lined with paste chocolate one at a time!

John Cadbury made his first ‘French eating Chocolate’ in 1842 but it was not until 1875 that the first Cadbury Easter Eggs were made.

Progress in the chocolate Easter egg market was very slow until a method was found of making the chocolate flow into the moulds. The modern chocolate Easter egg with its smoothness, shape and flavour owes its progression to the two greatest developments in the history of chocolate – the invention of a press for separating cocoa butter from the cocoa bean by the Dutch inventor Van Houten in 1828 and the introduction of a pure cocoa by Cadbury Brothers in 1866. The Cadbury process made large quantities of cocoa butter available and this was the secret of making moulded chocolate or indeed, any fine eating chocolate.
The earliest Cadburychocolate eggs were made of ‘dark’ chocolate with a plain smooth surface and were filled with dragees.
The earliest ‘decorated eggs’ were plain shells enhanced by chocolate piping and marzipan flowers.

The Easter Bunny
The Easter Bunny is a folkloric figure and symbol of Easter, depicted as a rabbit bringing Easter eggs. Originating among German Lutherans, the ‘Easter Hare’ originally played the role of a judge, evaluating whether children were good or disobedient in behaviour at the start of the season of Eastertide.

Daffodils announce beginning of the spring and waking of nature. They are one of the rare species of plants that are able to successfully grow through the snow.
Ancient Romans cultivated daffodils and believed that sap extracted from the flowers possesses healing properties.

 

Easter Facts

1 Every year more than 80 million boxed eggs are sold.
2 In a typical year, £150million is spent on shell eggs.
3 £70 million is spent on creme filled eggs in a year.
4 Enough Cadbury’s Creme eggs are made in Birmingham every year to make a pile ten times higher than Mount Everest if you put them on top of each other.
5 One in every three shell eggs sold in the UK at Easter is made in the Cadbury’s chocolate factory in Bournville, Birmingham.

6.Sales at Easter time make up 10 per cent of UK chocolate spending for the whole year.
7 When it comes to eating a chocolate bunny, 76% of people go for the first, 5% bite off the feet first and 4% eat the tail first.
8 There was a motion passed through parliament in the 1920s to get Easter Sunday to fall on the second sunday of April every year, but this has yet to be implemented.
9 In 2007, an Easte egg covered in diamonds sold for almost £9 million.