The Easter Bunny

The story

The Easter Bunny does not knock and does not wait around. He works in the last hour before sunrise, when the grass is still gray with dew, and he is gone before the first curtain opens. He is said to be a serious creature about his craft — particular about color, unhurried about hiding places, and quietly delighted by the moment a child looks straight at an egg three times before finally seeing it.

Where it actually comes from

The egg-bringing hare arrived in America with German immigrants to Pennsylvania in the 1700s, as the Osterhase: children built nests for him and he left colored eggs in them, which is how we got the Easter basket. Hares had long been spring symbols in Europe — they breed early and famously, and were believed, wrongly but persistently, to be able to conceive while already pregnant, which made them an emblem of fertility. Decorated eggs are far older still, and run across many cultures: Persian Nowruz has painted eggs, and Christians in the eastern Mediterranean dyed them red long before any hare was involved.

What it does for a child

An egg hunt is one of the best games ever invented for small children, and not only because of the chocolate. It rewards patience, close looking and persistence after early failure, and it does so in a setting where the stakes are zero and the adults are on your side. The larger idea underneath it — that things which look finished are often only resting — is one of the most useful things a child can carry into a hard winter later in life.

The Hare in the Juniper Bush

A story to read aloud · about 5 minutes

Long ago, in a high valley in the mountains of Germany, the winters were long and very hard. One year the snow fell so deep that the little cottages were buried almost to their roofs, and only the smoking chimneys peeped out. The waterfalls froze on the rocks and hung there all winter, glittering and silent.

So when the snow melted at last and spring came back, everyone in the valley was glad. The children ran up the hill paths again, picking the first blue violets and yellow cowslips. They wove them into wreaths for Edmund and Blanda, a brother and sister who had come from far away to live in the house at the top of the hill.

Then came Easter Sunday, the most beautiful spring day anyone could remember. The sun shone warm, the sky was clear and blue, and the meadows were green and dotted with flowers. It felt as if the whole world were waking up. The church bells rang out, and the children of the valley, dressed in their very best clothes, climbed the hill to spend the feast day with Edmund and Blanda.

They sat around a long table in the garden, on seats made of fresh green turf. In the middle stood a big bowl of warm milk with eggs stirred into it, and every child had a little clay bowl of their own.

Beside the garden was a small wood of young fir trees, where soft green moss grew thick on the rocks and roots. “Let’s each build a nest,” the children said, “a little nest of moss, just like the birds do.” So off they ran. Each child made a round, soft nest and took care to remember exactly where it was.

The youngest girl chose a spot under a juniper bush. Just as she began to build, out sprang a hare! It bounded away into the trees.

Back in the garden, a great cake of egg bread was waiting, braided into a ring like a wreath. Everyone had a big piece. Then the children hurried back to the little wood to look at their nests.

What a shout went up! In every nest lay five eggs, and all five were the same color. Some were as red as the inside of a rose. Some were as blue as the sky. Some were as yellow as lemons. And some had the shapes of tiny green leaves on them, as delicate as lace.

“Red eggs! Red eggs!” cried one child. “My nest is full of red eggs!”

“Mine are blue,” called another, “as blue as the sky today!”

“Mine are yellow, yellower than the cowslips, or that butterfly over there!”

“And mine have every color at once!”

A little boy stared at his nest. “Those must be wonderful hens,” he said, “to lay such beautiful eggs. I’d like to see them!”

“Oh, no,” said the youngest girl. “Hens don’t lay eggs as pretty as these. I think the little hare laid them. He jumped out of the juniper bush and ran away, right when I was building my nest there.”

All the children laughed together, and they said, just for fun, “The hare lays the colored eggs!”

Then the children who had only blue eggs wished for a red one, and the children with red eggs wished for a yellow one. So they traded back and forth until every child had eggs of every color. “We have never had such a happy day in all our lives,” they said.

The children’s joke about the hare was told again the next spring, and the spring after that, and in some places it is still told today. So on Easter morning, if you find bright eggs hidden in a nest of moss or grass, look closely at the bushes nearby. You might just see a pair of long ears, bounding away.

Adapted from Christoph von Schmid, Die Ostereier (The Easter Eggs), chapter 4: Das Fest der gefärbten Eier, ein Kinderfest (1816). Public domain. Read the original.

More from the story

A few more pictures to look at together.