CULTURE CHOC

Sarah-Kate cracks the Easter-egg connection

For years, I struggled, come Easter, to put chocolate eggs together with Jesus dying on the cross. And I went to a Catholic school! You’d have thunk the nuns might have explained that one! (Of course, it’s possible they did, but I was up the back, playing gin rummy behind my desk, and didn’t listen.)

Anyway, for us, as kids, Easter was a very churchy affair. There was something on the Friday that involved a lot of standing and kneeling, and sitting and standing up again. And there was something else with a lot of walking on the Saturday, plus the normal obligatory Sunday attendance.

Frankly, it seemed excessive, but who were we to argue? At that stage? When children did what their parents said no matter how little sense it made?

The light at the end of this religious tunnel was, back then, the Easter eggs we would get when we got home on Sunday morning. This was particularly exciting for us because as Catholic kids, we were required to give up sweets for Lent, the six weeks preceding Easter.

Obviously, we did not make that decision ourselves because if we had, we would have given up Brussels sprouts instead.

But no, sweets it was. Or wasn’t. Bummer if you were wretched enough to have a birthday in that time and your parents were strict observers. Good luck getting any kid to go to that birthday party.

So come Easter Sunday, once our churchly duties were over, we Lynch kids would race home and start nailing those Easter eggs like no ovum has ever been nailed before.

Except for the year when the dog ate them all while we were out worshipping, then proceeded to excrete tiny bits of coloured tin foil about the property for, like, a week afterwards. That was not a pretty Easter. And no-one liked the dog much for a while either.

Back then, such was my greed, I never wondered what chocolate eggs had to do with religion, but after extensive research (aka Google), I now know that the egg has long been a symbol of rebirth – as in Jesus being resurrected from his tomb. See, I wasn’t playing cards all the time!

Anyway, decorated hen or duck eggs started turning up at Easter centuries ago, with egg-shaped toys being given to children in the 1700s.

Then, in 1875, good old John Cadbury made his first chocolate Easter egg.

Well done, sir! Good job! I’m guessing he didn’t know then that eventually palm oil would be used in such confection, thus endangering the orangutan population on the other side of the world. So it was a pretty blimmin’ ace invention at the time and still a tiny bit holy because of the whole symbol-of-rebirth thing.

Bearing that in mind, my advice this Easter is to go forth and multiply your sustainably-produced-ifpossible chocolate eggs, but remember – hiding them under the bed makes for very unpleasant confetti.