Ring the bells! Lock the doors! Stop the presses!
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
We have discovered a (gasp) political incorrectness about to take place in Bendigo.
It’s the – wait for it – Bendigo Easter Festival.
Next weekend tens of thousands of people, children even, will flock to our fine city to take part in events such as story-telling trees, egg hunts, art, street markets and street parades.
But we are gob-smacked that as yet no-one has demanded that Bendigo follow the moral leadership of the supermarkets and de-Easter the festival!
Seriously, it’s hard to work out the thinking behind the push not to use the word Easter, but it seems to be because it’s a Christian term, and just as the Americans have de-Christened Christmas, calling the season The Holidays, some want the same to happen to Easter.
But ... There’s always a “but”.
+++
Easter is NOT just a Christian festival. In fact, in strict terms, it’s anything but Christian.
Easter tracks its long wordy way back to Old English Easterdaeg, via an old Northumbrian word Eostre, after bouncing over the North Sea from very early German austron.
This where it gets really interesting. That last Germanic word means dawn, and it was also the name given to a goddess of fertility and renewal.
All of this happened long before a certain chap from Nazareth turned the world on its head.
Austron also lead to our word east or the direction in which the sun rises, and aurora. Not to mention eostrogen the female fertility hormone.
Thus our festival is about to covertly celebrate a pre-Christian pagan religion. Either that, or celebrating the sun rising in the east,
We await angry letters.
+++
What about the eggs and rabbits?
Turns out they’re mainly proto-Germanic as well.
Little German kiddies had a tradition of leaving coloured flowers out in the garden for a magical rabbit to eat so it would lay coloured eggs.
It seems biology wasn’t a strong suit back then.