Easter Traditions From Around The World
Decorating eggs, hiding baskets of candy, ham dinners. We have so many Easter traditions, but there are some really unusual ones from around the world. Here are some of them.
In Australia, instead of an Easter bunny they have an Easter bilby. It’s a small animal native to the deserts of Central Australia. They have small bodies with a long snout and tail, silky fur and large floppy ears. Unfortunately the bilby population is disappearing in Australia and they use it to bring attention to it
Kids in Finland celebrate Easter almost the way American kids celebrate Halloween. The kids get dressed up in costumes, for some reason they usually dress up like witches and go door to door asking for treats. Peeps maybe?
In this country we color our Easter eggs all kinds of usually pastel colors – yellow, green, pink, lavender, blue. In Greece, nearly all their Easter eggs are dyed dark red – to symbolize the blood Jesus sacrificed and for rebirth.
A very symbolic tradition in Bermuda on Good Friday is to fly kites. It symbolizes the ascension of Jesus into heaven.
A German tradition is to decorate trees with handpainted eggs. Sometimes a single tree has thousands of eggs.
An Easter tradition in France is to make a giant omelette. It goes back to the days of Napoleon when he rested his army in a small village in the south of France. He was treated to an omelette made by a local innkeeper that he liked so much that he ordered everyone in the village to gather all of their eggs and make a huge omelette for his troops the next day. From then on it became a tradition to feed the village’s poor on Easter. That tradition is observed in many French-American areas of Louisiana.