This week the girls take aim at Easter...
In the third installment of the FNWF A &B edition, Bianca and Amy take a closer look at the widely celebrated holiday of Easter! Western Christians, using the Gregorian calendar, determined that Easter would always occur between the 22nd of March and the 25th of April each year within seven days of the astronomical full moon.
But first, what were we drinking?
Amy was drinking something from the wine pyramid scheme
Bianca was drinking Cape Shank Pinot Noir
Available from T'Gallant (no link because the winery closed down *cries*)
Amy talks about a common theme of easter being the easter bunny. As a kid, she never questioned his existence. He was like Santa or the tooth fairy. He was just there and she knew he was real because he left us chocolate eggs on Easter Sunday.
As an adult, Amy can’t help but wonder “what’s up with the rabbit? Why not some zombie Jesus?” “What's up with the eggs and why are they made of chocolate?”. With these questions in mind, she went straight down the internet rabbit hole to answer these exact questions.
Here goes.
Ok, so the Easter bunny….. WTF?
According to Wikipedia, the idea of the easter bunny came from German Lutherans (a species of Christians) who adopted the figure as a kind of Santa Claus. He brought gifts to good children the night before Easter Sunday. The gifts included coloured eggs as well as lollies or candy and sometimes toys.
The concept of a rabbit apparently came from the fact that the rabbit was a symbol of fertility and during spring when Easter was celebrated, symbols of fertility were everywhere.
Why eggs? It was an established tradition to colour eggs during the springtime to celebrate the new season. People would use flowers to colour eggs. Cute right!? It was common practice in England for children to go and beg for eggs door to door the Saturday before lent which is another Christian holiday that commemorates the 40 days that Jesus allegedly spent fasting in the desert. So eggs were a common gift for children during this time and hence the bunny brings eggs. Also, eggs were a sign of fertility.
Who made them chocolate?
This was a stroke of pure genius I say.
Back in the day chocolate was bitter and was for drinking, not eating. Over time it developed into a sweet treat. Chocolate eggs first appeared in the court of Louis XIV but were not affiliated with easter.
In 1875 some genius at Cadbury decided to create the modern Easter egg after developing a pure cocoa butter that could be moulded into shapes and history was made people. They marketed the chocolate eggs in time for easter and boom! A tradition that would live on for many generations was born.
Bianca at first glance while quickly googling thought "omg what is this weird crime tradition that happens every year in Norway. Like are you good fam?"
Then she dug deeper and it's not quite as sinister as originally thought. But still weird.
One would think that after a long, dark, and bitter winter, Norwegians would welcome spring, sun, and the promise of summer.
That is probably true for the cold-challenged, but many Norwegians choose to extend the winter by spending the Easter holiday in their mountain log cabins, armed with mutton, eggs, and chocolate wafers.
However, one more ingredient is needed to really get into the spirit. To some, it is the highlight of the holiday. Murder. Preferably many of them, safely experienced between two book covers. Between shoveling snow or skiing on it, Easter for Norwegians means wallowing in crime fiction. In Norway, you can’t avoid it that one week of the year.
TV bursts with high-profile British mystery shows. On the radio, NRK has produced radio plays. Your newspaper’s weekend supplement has probably commissioned a crime short story and interviewed an expert on why Norwegians read Easter crime fiction, or “påskekrim”.
And then there was the bakery that asked its Facebook followers to find out who had stolen their cupcakes. A fictional cupcake kidnapping case, because what is Easter without crime everywhere, right?
The reading of crime fiction during Easter is believed to be a tradition unique to Norway. The seed of the Easter crime phenomenon can be attributed to a specific day in history because it was a book publisher’s marketing ploy that started it all.
On March 24th, 1923 (the day before Palm Sunday), Oslo newspaper Aftenposten printed the headline “The train to Bergen was robbed last night” across the front page. The news spread like a free money rumor. In reality, there was no headline.
What Aftenposten had printed was in fact an ad for a novel of the same name, but few picked up on the small disclaimer printed next to it. “Bergenstoget plyndret i nat” was written by Jonathan Jerv, or Jonathan Wolverine, an alias for two students, Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie. Both were born in Bergen on Norway’s west coast. Grieg went on to be one of Norway’s most prominent authors in the 1920s and 30s, while Lie would become a major figure in publishing.
However, it is widely regarded that it was the publisher Gyldendal’s director Harald Grieg, Nordahl’s brother, who was responsible for making the book a best seller. 15 years before Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” radio drama caused panic because of its simulated news, Harald Grieg achieved the same effect by employing the method known today as clickbait. When word got out that the robbery only took place in a book, readers rushed to the book stores.
Harald Grieg did probably not intend to create a specific and lasting tradition. Granted, he wanted to sell books, but even though he realised that selling light literature in March and April was a way to branch out for an industry that usually released their books in the fall, reading detective fiction instead of going to church is thought to have fastened its roots because of the specifics of the Norwegian Easter.
The most far-fetched theories, according to Norway’s crime fiction expert Nils Nordberg, stretch back to pre-Christian times. Blood sacrifice was made by Viking ancestors roughly around the time when Easter would fall centuries later. The plan was to secure crops and keep the gods happy. Maybe traces of this remain in Norwegian genes in the form of fascination for stories about violence? The metaphorical sacrificial lamb and the scapegoat are, after all, no small part of crime fiction.
Easter itself has a dark back story. When God sent the angel of death to kill the first-born sons of the ancient Egyptians, blood smeared on houses saved Israelite families. Later, the criminal case, punishment, and death of a religious rebel, Jesus of Nazareth, gave Easter additional meaning.
But had these theories held water, Easter crime should have been a thing in many countries, which it is not.
The most probable explanation is much less complex, but still about a form of death: killing time.
Nordberg says this makes the most sense because Norway’s Easter holiday is the longest in the world. Norwegians leave their jobs for up to 10 days, with 5 of them being compulsory days off. One in four Norwegians spends their Easter in a mountain or coast cabin, where daily life is associated with simple pleasures and unwinding. After skiing, murder mysteries are perfect brain fodder next to the log fire.
HELP KEEP US HYDRATED
AKA Karma Points
