Driftwood #43: Fun Facts #1

March 8, 2024

Easter Facts

• Easter does not have a set date because the church never recorded the exact date of Jesus’s resurrection. In 325 A.D., the celebration for Easter was set as the first Sunday after the first full moon of the Spring equinox by the council of Nicaea. This is the reason that Easter day ends up anywhere between March 22 and April 25th.
• The church forbade eating eggs during Lent (the 40 days before Easter) until the 16th century. The eggs represent new life and rebirth, so people saved all eggs laid during Lent and painted them to serve as decoration until the fast was over. On Easter Sunday, the family would have a feast that included the eggs in celebration of the rebirth of Jesus.
• A lost tradition in churches is egg-tossing during the Easter Vigil which takes place on the night of Holy Saturday. The priest would throw an egg to a choirboy, and the choirboys would toss it to each other around the church. Whoever was still holding it at midnight would get to keep it.
• During the 16th century, children in Scotland and Northern England would go door to door reciting rhymes for eggs, cheese, and bacon to add to their family’s Easter feasts.
• Cascarones are an alternative to the popular dyed hard-boiled eggs. Originating in China, cascarones are believed to have been brought by Marco Polo to Spain and then to the Americas. In the lower United States and Mexico, the insides of the eggs are removed from the shell by making and then blowing through a small hole in the bottom. Once cleaned, the eggshell is painted, filled with confetti, and sealed with tissue paper. On Easter day, it is tradition to smash the cascarones over people’s heads to give them luck, and it is also considered a sign of affection.
• An old superstition stated that you needed to wear new clothes on Easter to have good luck for the rest of the year. New Yorkers would walk along the streets to show off their new clothes after mass. This is believed to be the beginning of the New York Easter parade.
• Each year, 90 million chocolate bunnies are produced in a variety of flavors. No matter the flavor, 89% of Americans eat their bunnies’ ears first. Only 9% will go for the tails or feet first.
• The world’s largest chocolate egg was made in Italy measuring 34 ft high and 15,873 lbs., but the most expensive chocolate bunny ever made cost $49,000.00. Besides the 548,000 calories of chocolate, the bunny had a pair of 1.07 carat diamonds for eyes. This hare stood about a foot tall and weighed about 11 lbs.
• American’s each Easter buy more than 700 million Peeps. In 1953, this would have been impossible to keep up with demand because it took 27 hours to make one Peep, but now they have the process down to just six minutes a Peep.
• Although people may say that Peeps last forever, they have been scientifically proven to only have a two-year shelf life.
• Jellybeans became a popular Easter candy around 1914 because World War I made eggs harder to get. The chewy candies were a great substitute on the Easter table because of their resemblance to colorful Easter eggs. Americans consume roughly 16 billion jellybeans each Easter, with cherry being the most popular flavor among children.

—Tiffany Jablonowski

Top photo of cascarones from My Mercado Mexican Imports. Bottom photo from Peeps Brand.