Why eggs for Easter?

Eggs and Easter go together like evergreens and Christmas, hearts and Valentine’s Day, shamrocks and St. Patrick’s Day, pumpkins and Hallowe’en, turkeys and Thanksgiving… you get the idea. But why is that? What does the egg have to do with Easter? Is this an ancient tradition, or a comparatively recent invention like the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy? Come with our friend Ben on a journey of discovery worthy of Sherlock Holmes…

First of all, our friend Ben wanted to see if the egg had been revered as a symbol of spring in ancient times, a sign of rebirth as the land came back to life after a long, bleak winter of death and deprivation. So I turned to Desmond Morris’s wonderful book, Body Guards: Protective Amulets and Charms. But Morris dismissed the egg in a sentence: “The egg is an obvious symbol of fertility, but is seldom worn as an amulet despite its reputation.”

Hmmm. Our friend Ben speculates that that’s because chickens were obscure African jungle fowl until relatively recent times, and other birds laid their eggs in trees, where it would have been challenging for ancient people to figure out what was going on with them. The “obvious symbol of fertility” would have been a lot more obvious when folks could actually see chicks hatching out of the eggs.

So let’s move on. Could the egg have become associated with Easter because of its connections with the Passover Seder? The Seder is a ceremonial supper that commemorates the Israelites’ flight from Egypt. An egg is one of six symbolic foods displayed on a special Seder plate at that supper: “A roasted egg, representing the hagigah or festival offering, a symbol of life itself, a triumph of life over death.” Wikipedia adds that this offering is “commemorated by an egg, a symbol of mourning (as eggs are the first thing served to mourners after a funeral), evoking the idea of mourning over the destruction of the Temple [the Great Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem].”  

It was the Seder that Christ was celebrating with His disciples at the Last Supper. Has the egg become associated with Easter for this reason?

Our friend Ben seriously doubted it. The Bible isn’t exactly filled with references to Jesus enjoying scrambled eggs for breakfast or hard-boiled eggs on a salad or mashed on some pita bread. Or baked or roasted chicken, come to that.

Our friend Ben is well aware that the Romans kept domesticated chickens, and that they took those chickens (and eggs) with them on their military campaigns. Silence Dogood and I have raised the beautiful, elegant Speckled Sussex hen that was the breed Caesar originally brought to the British Isles with his troops in 55 B.C. Wouldn’t the Romans have taken chickens to the Holy Land as well? And might they and their eggs have formed part of the indigenous diet by Jesus’s day?

Sure enough, in Luke 11:11-13, Jesus says that a father gives good gifts to his children, including bread, fish, and eggs. (Specifically, Luke 11-12: “Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?”) So clearly, eggs were an important part of the diet of Jesus’s day. And moreover, if eggs were traditionally associated with mourning as well as rebirth, perhaps they became even more closely tied to Jesus’s death and resurrection as a perfect symbol.

All this symbolic significance may be true. But our friend Ben would also like to put forward another explanation. Silence and I keep a tiny flock of heritage-breed chickens, and we love the rich, delicious eggs they give us. But we only enjoy them for part of the year.

That’s because chickens are triggered to lay eggs by increasing daylength in spring, and to stop laying eggs by decreasing daylength in fall, so that they can conserve their energy for their own maintenance and health during the cold, dark months of winter. The reason you’re able to buy fresh eggs year-round is that modern facilities both heat and light their buildings so that chickens are tricked into thinking that they’re living in a perpetual spring/summer and lay eggs accordingly.

Our friend Ben and Silence don’t do this to our hens. We revel in the unbelievably rich, delicious, organic eggs they lay from spring to fall, and then we give them a winter break to build up their strength. During the time when our hens don’t lay, we’re forced to resort to store-bought eggs, and let me tell you, even free-range farm eggs from our local farmers’ market are a weak, pale-yolked, flavorless excuse for our eggs.

So let’s go back in the day, before electric lights and heat made year-round egg production possible. Through all that time, everyone looked forward to egg season starting with even more fervor than Silence and I do, since they didn’t even have the option to buy factory or year-round farmed eggs. And egg season began with the increasing daylength of spring. No wonder eggs seemed like the perfect symbol of rebirth and celebration!

Eggs for Easter: However you look at it, it makes sense.

Our chickens have been laying for three weeks now, so we have fresh-laid eggs for Easter. We assume that pre-electricity, farmers and families that raised their own chickens, as well as the urban wealthy who bought eggs from others, would also start getting eggs about now. If they looked forward to those rich, delicious eggs the way Silence and I do, no wonder they’d link the arrival of eggs with Easter, the season of joy and rebirth!