alt.education

The Grave Threat of the Easter Bunny
By Tom Purcell
FrontPageMagazine.com
Friday, March 21, 2008

Another tradition is making some people uneasy:
the Easter Bunny.

Some folks, worried that the Easter Bunny correlates
too closely with Christian traditions and is therefore
offensive to non-Christians, are abandoning the little
fellow.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the town of
Walnut Creek renamed its Easter Bunny the "Spring
Bunny." The Spring Bunny participates in the town's
storied annual tradition, the Spring Egg Hunt.

Some malls across America are changing the Easter
Bunny's name, too. According to WorldNetDaily.com,
some store managers are calling their bunny "Baxter
the Bunny," "Garden Bunny" or "Peter Rabbit."

Peter Rabbit was the name of choice for a Rhode
Island school superintendent who, according to
ABCnews.com, decided the Easter Bunny ought not
visit his school district.

His decision made the ACLU happy. After all, as one
ACLU fellow said, schools shouldn't be in the business
of promoting Easter celebrations.

Which leads to some interesting questions: What is
the Easter celebration, anyhow? What is the origin of
the Easter Bunny?

Lawrence Cunningham, a University of Notre Dame
theology professor, said in the San Francisco Chronicle
that the Easter Bunny has little to do with religion.

"The bunny is a fertility symbol with no religious
connection to Easter," he said. "The egg, which was
popularized in Greece, Russia, and Eastern Europe in
connection with Easter, does not have a religious
connection to Easter. By taking away the term 'Easter,'
these symbols to some extent return to their
pre-Christian roots as symbols of spring fertility."

In other words, somewhere along the line, the furry
fellow got twisted up with the resurrection of Jesus.
Somewhere along the line, he started wearing a vest
and handing out eggs and candy. It took a bit of time --
hundreds of years or more -- for the Easter tradition I
knew as a kid to evolve.

Forty days before Easter Sunday, on Ash Wednesday,
we'd attend Mass. Lent was on, which meant we had to
make a sacrifice of some kind. That meant one thing in
our home: no Snyder's of Berlin potato chips until after
Easter.

We'd take in the Stations of the Cross on Friday nights.
We'd go to Confession before Easter Sunday ("Forgive
me, Father, but I stopped at the convenience store three
times for Snyder's of Berlin potato chips ..."). The night
before Easter, my whole family would sit around the
kitchen table dying hard-boiled eggs. Why hard-boiled
eggs? Why dye them? We didn't ask. It was tradition.

Finally, Easter Sunday arrived. I was usually the first to
rise. I'd rouse my sisters, so we could rush downstairs
and search for our baskets. The Easter Bunny was big
on hiding things. Eggs are still turning up on the White
House's South Lawn from Easter Egg Rolls that date
back to the Truman administration.

I'd spend the next hour devouring hollow chocolate
bunnies. Then we'd eat a big breakfast, go to Mass and
stand in the aisles because the stragglers who never
went to Mass were always sitting in our regular seat. I'd
spend the rest of the day trying to find where my sisters
hid their hollow chocolate bunnies.

Who knows how or why the Easter tradition evolved this
way. It's the blending of the customs of so many different
people who made their way to America. Over time, the
different customs melted together to form the American
Easter tradition.

In fact, our current customs will continue to evolve to
reflect the different influences that continue to blend
within our energetic country. That's what customs and
traditions do.

But wouldn't it be best that they evolve naturally and
slowly and honestly, as they always have, rather than
at the behest of a lawyer who threatens to sue
because somebody may be offended by an Easter
Bunny handing out candy on public property?

It's a sign of a great civilization that we worry so about
offending anyone for any reason, but isn't it a sign of a
weakening civilization when people are afraid to call
things what they really are?

The bunny who hands out candy and eggs is the
Easter Bunny, not the Spring Bunny. He's harmless,
too, so long as you don't mind him hiding toxic, fatty
chocolate things all over your house.

Tom Purcell's weekly political humor column runs in
newspapers and Web sites across America.
Visit him at www.TomPurcell.com.