There’s More to Easter than Eggs

While Easter’s date changes from year to year, it is a celebration incontrovertibly rooted in springtime, and whichever way you plan to celebrate (or not) this year, we hope you’ll take a moment to check in with Khéma to sample our gourmet range of Chocolate Easter Eggs.

This year, Easter will fall on April 12, though this time it will sadly not be celebrated with the usual church services, egg hunts, egg rolls and sharing of Easter eggs among family and friends. Instead, it will certainly be a quieter affair, but that’s no reason why you can’t indulge in one of its most famous features, a lovely Chocolate Easter Egg from Khéma.

While Easter’s date changes from year to year (for more on why see below), it is a celebration incontrovertibly rooted in springtime, a season marked by the birth and rebirth of animal and plant life in much of the Christian world. It is this essence of regeneration that lies at the heart of the Easter celebration, which marks the resurrection of Jesus Christ three days after he was crucified on the cross, and why eggs came to play such a central role.

Rich with symbolism, eggs have played an important role in the customs and beliefs of many nations, representing fertility, birth and the genesis of life. In Hinduism, the world egg symbolises the source of life, and creation of the universe, while in the Taoist myth of Pangu, the universe began as an egg symbolising the primordial state of Taiji (oneness, before duality emerged).

The celebration of Easter is one of the oldest, and most important, celebrations on the Christian calendar, and takes place as part of a series of commemorations, including Ash Wednesday (a day of penance), Palm Sunday (marking Christ’s triumphal return to Jerusalem before his suffering on the cross), Maundy Thursday (commemorating The Last Supper), and numerous others. However, it was not always associated with the resurrection.

In fact one of its roots lie in the Jewish celebration of Passover, from which it also derives its early practice of remembrance of Christ as the sacrificial lamb, and its method for determining the date on which it falls. The celebration is a “moveable feast” in the full meaning of the term, whose date is set at the first Sunday after the first full moon after March 21 (the March equinox under the Church calendar, when night and day are roughly equal length). But it wasn’t until the fourth century CE that the emphasis from sacrifice to resurrection was made. You can still see the reflection of Passover (“Pascha” in Greek and Latin) in the French word for Easter, Pâques.

The use of painted and decorated Easter Eggs was first recorded in the 13th century. Under old Church laws, the eating of eggs was forbidden during the Holy Week which culminates in Easter Sunday, but chickens continued to lay eggs during that week, and the idea of specially marking those as “Holy Week” eggs brought about their decoration.

Those early eggs soon led to more elaborate creations, with artificial eggs made of silver, gold, ivory or porcelain, often set with jewels, the most famous being the celebrated Fabergé eggs created in the 19th century for Russia’s Tsars as Easter gifts for their wives and mothers.

The first chocolate eggs were seen in France and Germany in the 19th century. Sweet chocolate was still a relative newcomer to European palates, and very much a luxury, and until then it hadn’t been possible to find a way to mould it. But once they had worked it out, embellishments were soon added, including the distinctive “crocodile skin” finish, which was originally designed to hide flaws.

But whichever way you plan to celebrate Easter (or not) this year, we hope you’ll take a moment to check in with Khéma to sample our gourmet range of Chocolate Easter Eggs, and speciality chocolates if you prefer something a little more fancy.