The Christian festival of Easter is celebrates the resurrection of Christ after having been crucified on Good Friday. Being a day of feast and traditions, the celebrations of the day are marked with a lot of ancient customs that many today just don’t understand. The deal with the eggs and Easter are one such mystery to anyone not familiar with ancient tradition. We try to explain why we have eggs at Easter.
Eggs laid during Holy Week and Lent were decorated to avoid waste
Hens could never be trained to not lay eggs because Christian humans decided they needed to fast for 40 days before Easter to cleanse their soul. And since eggs were a precious food in medieval Europe, people didn’t want to simply throw them away when they couldn’t eat them during Lent. Storing them was also a problem because no one had any refrigerators back then and since medicine also worked on a shot-in-the-dark principle; no one wanted to risk eating stale eggs either. Hence, to minimize waste of perfectly good eggs laid during Holy Week, people started decorating them and began giving it to each other as gifts on Easter.
Eggs were a forbidden food during Lent so they became a special part of Easter Day celebrations
Before being an atheist became fashionable, the Church had a big bearing on what foods were sinful and which were good for the soul. We don’t really know why, but sometime during the Middle Ages, the Church decided that people should not eat eggs during Lent, especially during the last week or the Holy Week leading up to Easter. Of course, when you tell people you can’t eat a particular food for religious reasons for a certain period of time; they are bound to find it much more attractive on the feast day menu.
Chocolate eggs were a substitute for real eggs during Lent
Like we told you before, eggs were a forbidden food during Lent and the Holy Week. In the 19th century, people in France and Germany began making chocolates in the shape of eggs to fool themselves into not craving their daily eggs. A few decades down the line, Nestle came along and it hired clever marketing execs who told people that God wouldn’t be happy with their Easter celebrations if they didn’t pay exorbitant sums for the chocolate eggs the brand made!
