Happy Easter
Happy Easter Weekend, from Heritage House Ministries!
Did you know these things about one of the world’s most-celebrated religious holidays?
1.5 billion candy peeps will be eaten over the weekend.
Hallmark has 240 styles of Happy Easter Cards this year.
Easter Sunday is the highest attended church service across the planet.
I have an internal clock that drives me this time of year, built into me for 61 years---MUST.BUY.NEW.DRESS.
$24 BILLION dollars is spent on this holiday each year.
In 1983, I sold my senior ring which had a topaz stone and bore the insignia of Cotton Valley High School Wildcats so that I could go into Sears at the Panama City Mall and buy our three beautiful little girls a new Easter dress. They matched. I have NEVER regretted that decision.
58% of all Americans visit the big-box discount stores each year for Easter supplies. (Listen to me friends—DO NOT GO TO WALMART THIS WEEKEND…I REPEAT…)
$33 BILLION dollars is spent on Easter candy each year.
I like candy, but cookies are my favorite.
78% of people eat the ears first when consuming chocolate bunnies.
Veggie Tales has a great story about chocolate bunnies.
Speaking of which, 90 million chocolate bunnies are sold each year.
81% of all adults have stolen candy from a child’s Easter Basket. (I am one of those adults.)
Easter is named after the Anglo-Saxon goddess of fertility—Eostre. Calling on her name was said to make one more fertile in ALL areas of life.
The Easter bunny originated in Germany in the 1300s and represented the pagan goddess of spring and fertility. It was blended with Christianity hundreds of years later by the Catholic Church and was used as an incentive for children to behave at the special service on Easter Sunday. If you were a good little girl or boy, the bunny would lay for you a colorful egg. (My mama and Aunt Norma should have tried that with
Rhonda and me. Things might have been different.)In most countries, lamb is eaten on Easter Sunday as a celebration of The Last Supper, during which scholars believe lamb would have been eaten.
The idea that there were only men at The Last Supper with Christ is ridiculous and in complete contradiction to His nature as well as to historical, and cultural context.
Although lamb is more traditional, we Southerners prefer ham on Easter Sunday. Any self-respecting Southern Pentecostal woman (like my mama) knows that. And we want potato salad, deviled eggs, southern vegetables, ambrosia salad, yeast rolls, coconut cake, and sweet tea for our holy celebration, dang it.
For countless generations, Ukrainians have been decorating eggs as a calling out to the gods and goddesses of health and fertility.
Dying and hunting eggs is a lot of fun.
The MOST expensive easter egg ever is The Third Imperial Easter Egg by Faberge’, worth $33 million dollars! Faberge’ eggs were produced by Peter Carl Fabergé in Russia, mainly as Easter gifts for the Russian aristocracy from 1885 to 1917, during the reign of Tsar Alexander III and Nicholas II. They’re beautiful, they’re expensive, and no two eggs are the same. Most of them can be seen in various art museums in Russia but you might just want to just look at pictures for now…
About dying eggs…my little girls always complained a bit because we had our own chicken eggs which were brown. Finally, our capitalism paid off, and we were able to buy white eggs from the store. Best.Easter.Ever.
Ever wondered why Easter Sunday changes date every year, unlike the OTHER holy day of Christmas which fits so tidily into our Roman Calendars on December 25th? It’s down to the lunar calendar and the position of the moon. Easter in fact falls on the first Sunday after the full moon that takes place on or after March 21st, which is said to signal the start of spring.
I like spring. It might be our most beautiful season here at Heritage Farm.
And one last thing…it’s no one’s business to tell YOU how you should or shouldn’t do things. But this we DO know…Father DID send His only Begotten Son to the earth to fulfill the will of His Father. He DID live…and die…in honor of that beautiful plan of redemption…and the resurrection has nothing to do with Easter bunnies and dyed eggs, coconut cake, or deviled eggs. The resurrection is about the glorious truth that the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in US and leads us and changes us and teaches us the ways of the Father…until we became the likeness and image of Christ in heaven and in the earth…and that is WAY better than having the Easter Bunny lay me a nest of colored eggs.
Love y’all!
Sandy