For several decades, Easter was variously celebrated on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Finally, in A.D. 325, the Council of Nicaea, convened by the emperor Constantine, issued the so-called Easter Rule: Easter should be celebrated on “the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.” Consequently, Easter is astronomically bound never to fall earlier than March 22 or later than April 25.
At this same council, Constantine decreed that the cross be adopted as the official symbol of the Christian religion.
Easter Bunny. That a rabbit, or more accurately a hare, became a holiday symbol can be traced to the origin of the word “Easter.” According to the Venerable Bede, the English historian who lived from 672 to 735, the goddess Eastre was worshiped by the Anglo-Saxons through her earthly symbol, the hare.
The custom of the Easter hare came to America with the Germans who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From Pennsylvania, they gradually spread out to Virginia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, New York, and Canada, taking their customs with them. Most eighteenth-century Americans, however, were of more austere religious denominations, such as Quaker, Presbyterian, and Puritan. They virtually ignored such a seemingly frivolous symbol as a white rabbit. More than a hundred years passed before this Teutonic Easter tradition began to gain acceptance in America. In fact, it was not until after the Civil War, with its legacy of death and destruction, that the nation as a whole began a widespread observance of Easter itself, led primarily by Presbyterians. They viewed the story of resurrection as a source of inspiration and renewed hope for the millions of bereaved Americans.
Easter Eggs. Only within the last century were chocolate and candy eggs exchanged as Easter gifts. But the springtime exchanging of real eggs—white, colored, and gold-leafed—is an ancient custom, predating Easter by many centuries.
From earliest times, and in most cultures, the egg signified birth and resurrection.
The Egyptians buried eggs in their tombs. The Greeks placed eggs atop graves. The Romans coined a proverb: Omne vivum ex ovo,“All life comes from an egg.” And legend has it that Simon of Cyrene, who helped carry Christ’s cross to Calvary, was by trade an egg merchant. (Upon returning from the crucifixion to his produce farm, he allegedly discovered that all his hens’ eggs had miraculously turned a rainbow of colors; substantive evidence for this legend is weak.) Thus, when the Church started to celebrate the Resurrection, in the second century, it did not have to search far for a popular and easily recognizable symbol.
In those days, wealthy people would cover a gift egg with gilt or gold leaf, while peasants often dyed their eggs. The tinting was achieved by boiling the eggs with certain flowers, leaves, logwood chips, or the cochineal insect. Spinach leaves or anemone petals were considered best for green; the bristly gorse blossom for yellow; logwood for rich purple; and the body fluid of the cochineal produced scarlet.
In parts of Germany during the early 1880s, Easter eggs substituted for birth certificates. An egg was dyed a solid color, then a design, which included the recipient’s name and birth date, was etched into the shell with a needle or sharp tool. Such Easter eggs were honored in law courts as evidence of identity and age.
Easter’s most valuable eggs were hand crafted in the 1880s. Made by the great goldsmith Peter Carl Fabergé, they were commissioned by Czar Alexander III of Russia as gifts for his wife, Czarina Maria Feodorovna. The first Fabergé egg, presented in 1886, measured two and a half inches long and had a deceptively simple exterior. Inside the white enamel shell, though, was a golden yolk, which when opened revealed a gold hen with ruby eyes. The hen itself could be opened, by lifting the beak, to expose a tiny diamond replica of the imperial crown. A still smaller ruby pendant hung from the crown. The Fabergé treasures today are collectively valued at over four million dollars. Forty-three of the fifty-three eggs known to have been made by Fabergé are now in museums and private collections.
Easter egg rolling in Germany (left); Easter procession in Holland. Once a pagan feast honoring Eastre, goddess of spring and offspring, it later came to represent the Resurrection of Christ.
Hot Cross Buns. Traditionally eaten at Easter, the twice-scored biscuits were first baked by the Saxons in honor of Eastre. The word “bun” itself derives from boun, Saxon for “sacred ox,” for an ox was sacrificed at the Eastre festival, and the image of its horns was carved into the celebratory cakes.
The Easter treat was widespread in the early Western world. “Hot cross buns” were found preserved in the excavations at the ancient city of Herculaneum, destroyed in A.D. 79 along with Pompeii by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Early church fathers, to compete with the pagan custom of baking ox-marked cakes, used in numerous celebrations, baked their own version, employing the dough used for the consecrated host. Reinterpreting the ox-horn image as a crucifix, they distributed the somewhat-familiar-looking buns to new converts attending mass. In this way, they accomplished three objectives: Christianized a pagan cake; gave the people a treat they were accustomed to; and subtly scored the buns with an image that, though decidedly Catholic, at a distance would not dangerously label the bearer “Christian.” The most desirable image on today’s hot cross buns is neither an ox horn nor a cross, but broad smears of glazed frosting.
April Fool’s Day: 1564, France
Many different explanations have been offered for the origins of April Fool’s Day, some as fanciful as April Fool jokes themselves.
One popular though unlikely explanation focuses on the fool that Christ’s foes intended to make of him, sending him on a meaningless round of visits to Roman officials when his fate had already been sealed. Medieval mystery plays frequently dramatized those events, tracing Christ’s journey from Annas to Caiaphas to Pilate to Herod, then back again to Pilate. (Interestingly, many cultures have a practice, predating Christianity, that involves sending people on “fool’s errands.”)
The most convincing historical evidence suggests that April Fooling originated in France under King Charles IX.
Throughout France in the early sixteenth century, New Year’s Day was observed on March 25, the advent of spring. The celebrations, which included exchanging gifts, ran for a week, terminating with dinners and parties on April 1.
In 1564, however, in beginning the adoption of the reformed, more accurate Gregorian calendar, King Charles proclaimed that New Year’s Day be moved back to January 1. Many Frenchmen who resisted the change, and others who merely forgot about it, continued partying and exchanging gifts during the week ending April 1. Jokers ridiculed these conservatives’ steadfast attachment to the old New Year’s date by sending foolish gifts and invitations to nonexistent parties. The butt of an April Fool’s joke was known as a poisson d’Avril, or “April fish” (because at that time of year the sun was leaving the zodiacal sign of Pisces, the fish). In fact, all events occurring on April 1 came under that rubric. Even Napoleon I, emperor of France, was nicknamed “April fish” when he married his second wife, Marie-Louise of Austria, on April 1, 1810.
Years later, when the country was comfortable with the new New Year’s date, Frenchmen, fondly attached to whimsical April Fooling, made the practice a tradition in its own right. It took almost two hundred years for the custom to reach England, from which it came to America.
Mother’s Day: 1908, Grafton, West Virginia
Though the idea of setting aside a day to honor mothers might seem to have ancient roots, our observance of Mother’s Day is not quite a century old. It originated from the efforts of a devoted daughter who believed that grown children, preoccupied with their own families, too often neglect their mothers.
That daughter, Miss Anna Jarvis, a West Virginia schoolteacher, set out to rectify the neglect.
Born in 1864, Anna Jarvis attended school in Grafton, West Virginia. Her close ties with her mother made attending Mary Baldwin College, in Stanton, Virginia, difficult. But Anna was determined to acquire an education.
Upon graduation, she returned to her hometown as a certified public school teacher.
The death of her father in 1902 compelled Anna and her mother to live with relatives in Philadelphia. Three years later, her mother died on May 9, leaving Anna grief-stricken. Though by every measure she had been an exemplary daughter, she found herself consumed with guilt for all the things she had not done for her mother. For two years these naggings germinated, bearing the fruit of an idea in 1907. On the second Sunday in May, the anniversary of her mother’s death, Anna Jarvis invited a group of friends to her Philadelphia home. Her announced idea—for an annual nationwide celebration to be called Mother’s Day—met with unanimous support. She tested the idea on others. Mothers felt that such an act of recognition was long overdue. Every child concurred. No father dissented. A friend, John Wanamaker, America’s number one clothing merchant, offered financial backing.
Early in the spring of 1908, Miss Jarvis wrote to the superintendent of Andrews Methodist Sunday School, in Grafton, where her mother had taught a weekly religion class for twenty years. She suggested that the local church would be the ideal location for a celebration in her mother’s honor. By extension, all mothers present would receive recognition.
So on May 10, 1908, the first Mother’s Day service was held in Grafton, West Virginia, attended by 407 children and their mothers. The minister’s text was, appropriately, John 19, verses 26 and 27, Christ’s parting words to his mother and a disciple, spoken from the cross: “Woman, behold thy son!” and “Behold thy Mother!”
At the conclusion of that service, Miss Jarvis presented each mother and child with a flower: a carnation, her own mother’s favorite. It launched a Mother’s Day tradition.
To suggest that the idea of an annual Mother’s Day celebration met with immediate public acceptance is perhaps an understatement. Few proposed holidays have had so much nationwide support, so little special-interest-group dissension. The House of Representatives quickly passed a Mother’s Day resolution. However, one Midwestern senator came off like Simon Legree. “Might as well have a Father’s Day,” the Congressional Record states. “Or a Mother-in-Law’s Day. Or an Uncle’s Day.” The resolution stalled in the Senate.
A determined Anna Jarvis then began what has been called one of the most successful one-person letter-writing campaigns in history. She contacted congressmen, governors, mayors, newspaper editors, ministers, and business leaders throughout the country, everyone of importance who would listen. Listen they did, responding with editorials, sermons, and political orations. Villages and towns, cities and states, began unofficial Mother’s Day observances. By 1914, to dissent on the Mother’s Day issue seemed not only cynical but un-American. Finally, the Senate approved the legislation, and on May 8, 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed a proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother’s Day.
Although the British had long paid tribute to mothers on the fourth Sunday of the Lenten season, known as “Mothering Sunday,” it took the American observance to give the idea worldwide prominence. Within a few years after President Wilson’s proclamation, almost every country had a Mother’s Day. By every measure, though, the United States outdoes all the others. On Mother’s Day, Americans now purchase 10 million bouquets of flowers, exchange 150 million greeting cards, and dine at restaurants more than at any other time of the year. A third of all American families take Mother out to dinner on her day.
Though Anna Jarvis triumphed in her campaign for a Mother’s Day, her personal life did not have a happy ending. Disillusioned by a disastrous love affair, she vowed never to marry and, childless, came to view each Mother’s Day as a painful personal mockery. And as commercialization encroached upon what had been intended as a religious observance, she became litigious, initiating lawsuits against companies seeking to profit from Mother’s Day. The suits failed, and Anna Jarvis became a recluse. Within a short time, she exhausted her savings and lost her family home; a blind sister, Elsinore, to whom she had devoted her life, died. These misfortunes undermined her own health, and in November 1944 she was forced to seek public assistance. Realizing her desperate plight, friends provided funds so she could spend her final years in a private sanitarium. Deaf, ailing, and nearly blind, the woman whose efforts brought happiness to countless mothers died in 1948, childless and alone, at the age of eighty-four.
Father’s Day: June 19, 1910, Spokane, Washington
The idea for an official Father’s Day celebration came to a married daughter, seated in a church in Spokane, Washington, attentive to a Sunday sermon on Mother’s Day in 1910—two years after the first Mother’s Day observance in West Virginia.
The daughter was Mrs. Sonora Smart Dodd. During the sermon, which extolled maternal sacrifices made for children, Mrs. Dodd realized that in her own family it had been her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, who had sacrified—raising herself and five sons alone, following the early death of his wife in childbirth. For Mrs. Dodd, the hardships her father had endured on their eastern Washington farm called to mind the unsung feats of fathers everywhere.
Her proposed local Father’s Day celebration received strong support from the town’s ministers and members of the Spokane YMCA. The date suggested for the festivities, June 5, Mrs. Dodd’s father’s birthday—a mere three weeks away—had to be moved back to the nineteenth when ministers claimed they need extra time to prepare sermons on such a new subject as Father.
Newspapers across the country, already endorsing the need for a national Mother’s Day, carried stories about the unique Spokane observance. Interest in Father’s Day increased. Among the first notables to support Mrs. Dodd’s idea nationally was the orator and political leader William Jennings Bryan, who also backed Mother’s Day. Believing that fathers must not be slighted, he wrote to Mrs. Dodd, “too much emphasis cannot be placed upon the relation between parent and child.”
Father’s Day, however, was not so quickly accepted as Mother’s Day. Members of the all-male Congress felt that a move to proclaim the day official might be interpreted as a self-congratulatory pat on the back.
In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson and his family personally observed the day. And in 1924, President Calvin Coolidge recommended that states, if they wished, should hold their own Father’s Day observances. He wrote to the nation’s governors that “the widespread observance of this occasion is calculated to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children, and also to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”
Many people attempted to secure official recognition for Father’s Day. One of the most notable efforts was made in 1957, by Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who wrote forcefully to Congress that “Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable.”
Eventually, in 1972—sixty-two years after it was proposed—Father’s Day was permanently established by President Richard Nixon. Historians seeking an ancient precedent for an official Father’s Day observance have come up with only one: The Romans, every February, honored fathers—but only those deceased.
In America today, Father’s Day is the fifth-largest card-sending occasion, with about 85 million greeting cards exchanged.
Mother-in-Law’s Day. Few people, including mothers-in-law, realize that the fourth Sunday in October, according to a resolution passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1981, is set aside to honor mothers by marriage. To date, the resolution has not been adopted by the Senate, nor is there any recent activity to do so. Nonetheless, the greeting card industry continues to promote the idea and estimates that each year about 800,000 cards are given to mothers-in-law.
Grandparent’s Day. As a result of legislation signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1978, Grandparent’s Day is the Sunday after Labor Day. The person primarily responsible for pushing through the bill was a sixty-five-year-old grandparent from Atlanta
, Georgia: Michael Goldgar.
Goldgar got the idea for the national holiday while visiting an elderly aunt confined to a nursing home. Through conversations, he learned that most of the home’s residents were grandparents. The majority of them had living children, but they preferred the relatively independent life in the home over a more dependent and hurdensome existence they felt would come from moving in with a child. For Goldgar, this brought to mind earlier times in history, when grandparents were the nucleus of an extended family, respected for their accumulated wisdom. The nursing home experience, coupled with his regret that so many families were being disrupted through divorce, led him to begin a grass-roots movement for a Grandparent’s Day.
Using eleven thousand dollars from his own savings, Goldgar commenced his first of seventeen trips to Washington, D.C., to lobby for legislation. After a seven-year struggle, he succeeded in getting a day honoring grandparents signed into law. Today Americans send their grandparents more than four million greeting cards a year.
Halloween: 5th Century B.C., Ireland
Even in ancient times, Halloween was a festival for witches, goblins, and ghosts, as well as for lighting bonfires and playing devilish pranks.
What has changed over the centuries are the reasons for dressing up ghoulishly, lighting fires, and acting mischievous. Now these things are done for fun—and by children; in the past, they were done in deathly earnest—and by adults.
Named “All Hallows Eve,” the festival was first celebrated by the ancient Celts in Ireland in the fifth century B.C. On the night of October 31, then the official end of summer, Celtic households extinguished the fires on their hearths to deliberately make their homes cold and undesirable to disembodied spirits. They then gathered outside the village, where a Druid priest kindled a huge bonfire to simultaneously honor the sun god for the past summer’s harvest and to frighten away furtive spirits.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 8