By Michael Patrick O’Brien
Do you believe in the Easter Bunny?
You might think it unreal, or perhaps the sole domain of imaginative playwrights or abnormal psychology, but I’ve had many memorable encounters with unusually large rabbits.
And they usually happen around Eastertime.
Easter, of course, is the annual Christian holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus. In Latin, it is called “Pascha,” a name derived from the Jewish festival of Passover. In Greece, people wish each other “Kali Anastasi” meaning “Happy Resurrection!”
The name “Easter” comes from Germanic and Old English traditions. In his eighth century book The Reckoning of Time, English monk Bede described how each April the Anglo-Saxons held feasts to honor Ēostre, the goddess of spring and dawn. The Christian resurrection celebration eventually supplanted these feasts.
According to legend, Ēostre once saw a dying bird with frozen wings. She saved him and kept him as a companion named Lepus. She replaced his paralyzed wings by transforming him into a hare with astonishing speed. Honoring his avian legacy, Ēostre also gave Lepus the ability to lay eggs in all the colors of the rainbow, but only on one day a year. He was the first Easter Bunny.
From what I have read, the German Lutherans were the first to include a rabbit in their Easter celebrations. The “Easter Hare,” much like Santa Claus, assessed whether children were naughty or nice and rewarded good behavior with eggs, candy, or toys.
Like the German Lutherans, My Irish-Catholic mother was quite skilled at blending the religious and secular elements of the holidays. She told me that Santa Claus brought us gifts to celebrate the birthday of Jesus. Mom also said the Easter Bunny delivered baskets to honor his resurrection.
Each year, after the Easter Vigil Mass, we’d rush home to search for our baskets. The decorated containers held tangible expressions of parental love: hard boiled colored eggs (pretty but not really edible), jelly beans, and extra large candy bunnies. My boyhood Easter dilemma was whether to bite off the chocolate bunny ears or the tail first.
My wife Vicki and her sisters have similar fond childhood memories. Sometimes the Easter Bunny brought them real bunnies. They kept the furry creatures in a backyard hutch and named one pair “Sonny and Cher.” Vicki was allergic, but often risked a sneezy nose and red eyes for a bunny cuddle.
Each year Vicki’s family also made something called “a bunny cake.” I was nervous to try it at first, but dived in after learning how the name derived not from the ingredients, but from how it was decorated. It featured a giant bunny face, long ears, and a bow tie fashioned from round chocolate cakes topped with white frosting.
Confident that our affection for the Easter Bunny was genetically-based, one spring Vicki and I packed up our young daughter Erin—just nine months old at the time—and drove to the nearby grocery store. We were taking advantage of a well-advertised photo opportunity with the EB.
Unfortunately, our enthusiasm blinded us to the possibility that such close proximity to a massive rabbit would terrify a young child. As we stood in line, Erin was interested but wary, calm but perhaps questioning why her otherwise-protective parents had brought her within striking range of a huge animal with very large teeth.
This serene but alert demeanor morphed into loud and angry sobs when we placed her on the big creature’s lap. We tried to soothe her—the EB was kind and solicitous too—but it soon became quite clear that this particular Easter observance was premature.
There is only one photo of our daughter’s disastrous introduction to a mythical holiday creature. It looks exactly as you might expect (and illustrates this article). We enjoyed some guilty laughter back home, and quieted the hopefully-not-too-traumatized child by letting her watch…ironically…a giant dinosaur named Barney on TV.
A few months later—at Erin’s first Disneyland visit—we steered well clear of the giant White Rabbit that followed Alice around in Wonderland. Erin liked Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. Yet, she was both drawn to and repelled by Goofy. Perhaps the eerily similar height, long ears, and teeth brought back some bad memories.
These parental missteps contained valuable lessons. I never took Erin to see Mary Chase’s famous 1944 play about Elwood P. Dowd’s six foot tall friend Harvey the white rabbit. Moreover, we waited until our next two kids were a just little older before taking them to see either Santa or the Easter Bunny.
Because our initial forays into giant fictional creature encounters did not go exactly as planned, I was a little worried a few years later when my mother—now Grandma Kay—purchased Easter presents for our young children. They were large three-foot-tall stuffed animal rabbits. Would we have to deal with post traumatic bunny disorder?
We met her at a local restaurant for dinner and for the delivery of the holiday mascots. I did not tell our children about the rabbits, but in their own Pavlovian way, they knew that grandma visits included tangible tokens of love. As we drove near her, a conversation something like this occurred in our car.
Child One: “Do you see the things with large white ears in Grandma’s back seat?”
Child Two: “Are they giant Easter bunnies?”
Child Three: “I hope they are for us!”
After my children grew up, I did not see much of the festive and generous holiday hare. He may have been busy elsewhere. Nowadays he’s back, however, and my Easter Bunny encounters involve our grandson, who is not at all frightened by the large presence at our family feasts.
Last year—at just three months old—he watched and wondered why, as the weather warmed, his family kept setting him next to large plastic eggs, stuffed bunnies much bigger than him, or colorful bunny cakes, and snapping photos. A year later, he’s enthusiastically embraced the annual cottontail phenomenon.
I believe in the Easter Bunny too. I resolved my doubts after one other memorable rabbit encounter that I have not told you about yet.
I was reading a short book, perhaps an Easter gift, first published a century ago by British writer Margery Williams. The book is a credible authority in the obscure field of rabbit reality, be they velveteen or Easter in nature. Williams tells how a toy rabbit becomes real. The following three passages from the book helped convince me the EB is real.
***
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” [the rabbit] asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time.”
***
Even now as a much older man, I feel an abiding spirit of love, kindness, and renewal in the ancient saga about an unusually large rabbit who lays colored eggs. In a cynical world dominated by fake news, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, I like how we all—but especially children—have the power to make the Easter Bunny real with love.
And in the comforting words of The Velveteen Rabbit: “Once you are real you can’t become unreal again. It lasts for always.”
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, was published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
