Peter Cottontail is not the only one who’s ready to celebrate Easter, as the overwhelming turnout of students at the Palm Sunday mass at the Egan Chapel proved.
Although the number of students present reflected the respect students have on campus for the sacred meaning of Easter, statistics show that Hallmark, candy companies and Martha Stewart still have tight control over the holiday’s celebration.
In the Christian religious tradition, Easter marks the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion; for many of us, it also means indulging in whatever junk food, bad habits or curses we so reverently gave up for Lent.
This might explain why Americans spent $1.98 billion on Easter candy last year, making Easter the second-biggest holiday for candy sales, following closely behind Halloween, which brings in about $2 billion, according to the National Confectioners Association .
Peeps, the candy canes of Easter, once took 27 hours to make, yet their popularity called for an improved form of production. It now takes six minutes to make one of these marshmallow treats. It’s a good thing the production was changed because each year, Americans buy over 700 million Peeps, making them the most popular non-chocolate Easter candy, according to Infoplease.com .
Like Santa Claus to Christmas, the Easter Bunny is a figure that has evolved out of a religious story and has come to epitomize the holiday for young boys and girls.
The word “Easter” evolved from the name Eostre, the Germanic goddess of spring and renewal. Bunnies, who are known to reproduce at a rapid rate, were icons of fertility in ancient Egyptian times. Along with eggs, bunnies became symbols of rebirth and new life, since this, too, is what Jesus’ resurrection symbolizes for Christians.
Americans buy over 600 million eggs in March and April, according to About.com . Most of these are decorated in a tradition that spawns from that of the Persians, who dyed eggs red to celebrate spring – a practice dating back to 3000 B.C. The Germans introduced the Easter tradition of egg decorating to the United States in the 1700s.
While many holidays are now viewed as creations of the greeting card industry, Easter actually falls in fourth place as the most popular seasonal card-giving occasion. Ahead of it are Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, according to About.com.
For those of you looking to celebrate Easter in ways other than the traditional egg hunt, you can spend the day like the Norwegians and read a detective novel or crime thriller. Folklore professors at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the University of Oslo believe the tradition of reading about crimes on Easter may be a way of observing the nature of Christ’s violent death, according to Infoplease.com.
If you’re not much of a reader, you could try celebrating like the Swedish do, in a fashion similar to our Halloween traditions. Witches are thought to fly on broomsticks to church towers in Sweden on Easter Eve, and children visit neighbors dressed in costumes exchanging Easter cards for a piece of candy or a coin, according to Sweden’s Lulea University of Technology Web site.
Sometimes, however, it’s best to stick to what you know, and according to the numbers, for Americans that means a basket full of candy. So indulge, and don’t forget to thank Hallmark and the candy companies for making it acceptable.
Here are some interesting facts about the Easter candy industry, according to the National Confectioners Association:
If each of the 16 billion jelly beans purchased for the holiday were lined up tip-to-tip, they would circle the globe nearly three times.
Ninety million chocolate Easter bunnies are produced each year.
According to an online poll of approximately 18,000 Americans, 76 percent said chocolate bunnies should be eaten ears first, while only 4 percent said they eat the tail first.
Yellow Peeps are the most popular of the sugary treats; white is the least favorite.
The number of Peeps eaten at Easter could circle the globe more than once.
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