Here you see Cadillac Mountain shortly after sunrise today. In most years, the summit of this mountain in Acadia National Park is the site of a sunrise Easter service, where the sun first reaches the United States during parts of the year. Sadly, the Park is closed now, due to the corvid-19 plague
Near where that image was taken was the Fuller family banner on Naskeag Road this morning, flying a brightly decorated Easter egg in its nest:
Although Easter is revered by Christians as a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus, it also historically has been celebrated as a time for exchanging decorated eggs and building nests for the Bunny that laid those eggs.
The custom of exchanging eggs at Eastertime has been traced to the early Christians of Mesopotamia, where eggs were symbols of fertility and new life. Western Christians would not eat eggs during Lent, but would exchange decorated ones and then eat them on Easter day. The concept of decorating the eggs was extended to the extreme in the 1800s by Russian nobility, which exchanged jeweled and gold-encrusted eggs on Easter.
As for the Easter Bunny, the leading theory is that the origin of that tradition was the pagan festival honoring Eostre, the fertility goddess whose animal symbol was a rabbit. The imaginative idea of exchanging “rabbit eggs” at Easter reportedly came from Germanic peoples. They developed the custom for young children to enjoy Easter by making nests for the “Osterhase” (Easter Hare), which would come by while they were sleeping and lay decorated eggs in their nests. Apparently, in 18th Century German settlements in Pennsylvania, the Easter Hare was translated into English as the Easter Bunny for the children.
(Brooklin, Maine)