Easter is a moveable feast, the rule being that Easter Sunday is the first Sunday after the full moon after the Autumn Equinox.

Easter takes it’s name from “Eostre” the pre-Christian festival of Spring and rebirth.  It celebrated the instinctive forces, those involving reproduction, and physical love.  The early Christians re-worked this festival to incorporate the resurrection of Christ, and it is the most important of the Christian festivals.  Christ is both healer and awakener and by his death and resurrection, he has brought life forces into our waking consciousness.  Christ brought into our world a new form of love, the pure love of human beings for one another, regardless of gender, race or any other differences.

In celebrating this festival of Easter with young children, it helps to bring it to them through pictures and stories rather than intellectual explanations.  The egg is one of the most well known symbols of new life.  The outward appearance of the egg is cold and hard yet when we open it the golden yolk is revealed, like an image of the risen Christ.  In kindergarten we speak of the hare as the egg bringer at Easter.  Unlike the rabbit which lives within a large family in a burrow, the hare is an individual which makes it’s home wherever it finds itself.  The hare will sacrifice it’s life for the life of another by allowing a predator to chase it so that the other may rest.  For this reason it seems a suitable symbol for Christ, the bringer of new life.

Warmly,

Denise