HARE BRAINED

I never believed in the Easter Bunny. The very idea seemed implausible at best to me. Even at the tender age of five I couldn’t ignore the fundamental disconnect between the egg and the rabbit.

Rabbits don't lay eggs. They don't even eat eggs. What eggo-centric lunatic dreamed up this harebrained mythology?  Rabbits are cute and soft, but they are not bright. They eat grass and they poop,  Bunnies are basically just tiny, long eared cows. With short legs.  And I think their contribution to the world's methane surplus has been sorely under rated. Did I mention they were not good at mathematics? 

Listen - if you put an egg in front of a rabbit, the rabbit with nudge it aside to get to the grass underneath, even if it is plastic grass. You could even write the rabbit’s name on the side of the egg, and the rabbit would still ignore it.

And yet every year we insist upon convincing our toddlers that for some reason a rabbit has chosen to hide vast numbers of eggs all over our back yards. Under bushes. Behind flower pots. In trees. What is wrong with us?! Rabbits can’t climb trees.

You might as well tell your children that elephants have been herding water buffalo in your flower bed, or that squirrels are using your attic to store up their winter supply of canned beets. Why do we insist upon telling our children this particular absurd story?

Where is this rabbit supposed to get all of these eggs? And from whom is he supposedly hiding them? From the chickens, perhaps - otherwise known as “the mothers”. If you think about it an Easter Egg Hunt is a mass kidnapping and we are encouraging our children to be accessories after the fact. The F.B.I. should be involved in this story line, or at least Farmer McGreggor.

The very idea is so silly that most of the eggs hidden today aren’t even real, They're plastic. And they are filled with chocolate and licorice and sweet tarts, and other things that rabbits don’t eat! Show me a rabbit that eats sweet tarts and I will show you a candidate for hossenfeffer..

Children eat those things. They aren't healthy for the children, but they eat them anyway. Just like they eat old gum, or crickets. Those aren't good for children either, but given half a chance , any toddler with happily stick a live cricket in their mouth. And a few teenagers, too.

And I understand that the Easter Egg hunt is for the children's entertainment. It’s just supposed to be fun. But couldn’t it be logical and fun at the same time? Couldn’t we have an Easter chicken hiding the eggs? Why does it have to be a bunny rabbit?! Maybe instead of hiding the eggs,  he could be the one looking for the eggs. Although, again, why, I have no idea. There seems to be a subtle hidden nastiness inside the Easter Rabbit,

The birth of the Easter bunny is about as murky as the reasoning behind him being a him. And yes, the gender-bender nomenclature claims Mr. Bunny is a male fertility symbol – known in any other context as a creepy old man.- or a creepy old rabbit.  

The description of male rabbits during their mating season is "Mad as a March Hare".  Because the reality is they will copulate with anything that even remotely resembles a female rabbit. Anything.

It was the immortal Bede, the 7^th century rumor trolling English monk,  who claimed the Jewish festival of Passover occurred during the month of “Eostre”, who was an ancient Gallic fertility goddess, which means she was a woman, which seems more sensible as far as fertility is concerned. And definitely less ominous than the image of a male heir to all that sexual energy.

In 1835 Jacob Grimm – the elder of the brothers of the same name – suggested there was “linguistic support” for a “Proto-Indo-European goddess named 'Ostera' who brought the dawn each morning. In reward for delivering this gift of life the sleepy Proto-Indo- European males threw things at her, eggs maybe, told her to come back in an hour and probably called her the “B” word. 

Wrote the grim Mr. Grimm about this heathen Easter “ ...there seem to have lingered among the people Easter-games so-called....I allude especially to the custom of Easter eggs...”. To which I am forced to reply, “What the hell does that mean? 

Are we talking some kind of Proto-Indo-European symbolic Ostera eggs or egg eggs? According to Grimm's theory the Easter Egg hunt is a sort of primitive endurance contest, involving stuffing your face with “pastry of heathenish form”, and/or a “Cool Hand Luke” egg eating contest, only now with psychedelic colors. So you can over think this thing any way you want, and it still makes no sense.

I know I’m overwrought over this. The Easter bunny is just another one of those little contradictions in logic accepted without question by most people, one of those silly little stripped gears in the workings of our cultural machinery, that don’t make any sense but seem to be required to hold our society together.  Like Daylight savings time. Or that bar on boy’s bicycles. Or Keanu Reeves’ movie career.

You could get excited about outrageous, silly things like the Easter Bunny  Or you can just ignore them, and pretend there is a logic to them, and live your life in some semblance of calm. But to do so would be a fraud and you know it!

The truth shall set you free. And the truth is the the spring Easter Bunny is a violently, sexual predator.  I don’t know who said the thing about truth and freedom, whoever said it would be so argumentative they will probably out live the rest of us.  We deserve to know why it is that an Easter Bunny would hide eggs. And if the answer isn’t good enough, we have a right to pick our own illogical anthropomorphic creature upon which to base our Easter fun.

In a nutshell - or an an egg shell -  Rabbits are an old German symbol of fertility, for obvious reasons. And the egg is a symbol of...I guess breakfast and birth  And if you put those two together, the Easter Egg Hunt becomes a rabbit symbolically hiding his fertility all over your back yard, where your children are encouraged to hunt until they find it.

Are we nuts?  When they are five or six years old we send them looking for the symbol of fertility in their own backyard.. When they are twelve we don't even want them to be taught about this in the public schools!  No wonder Americans are so screwed up. We get our childhood from a furry Casanova, and our adolescence from Queen Victoria.

Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because, oddly enough I once had a male rabbit actually find his fertility  in my back yard. All over my backyard. And the deposit he left behind did not smell like eggs -  at least not fresh eggs. And I ended up with about fifty million female rabbits in my backyard for the next twenty-four hours or so. My dog was too scared to go outside. And I certainly didn’t want any small children going out there, either, because I wasn’t sure I could explain what they would see. Or suffer. Not to mention their propensity for picking things up and putting it in their mouths. What an Easter that was.

But, getting back to the mythology - Why in God's name would you want your children to find the secret of fertility? And I think I have found the solution to that question. So you can have a grandchild, that’s why. Grandchildren are essential because they help you torture your adult children, thus completing one slice out of the circle of life pie chart.

It’s curious that the chickens, who actually lay the millions of eggs that are stashed under bushes and flowers and lawn chairs on Easter Sunday, are not considered symbols of fertility. The feminists’ version of this is that these chicks do all the work while some crowing cock gets all the credit.  Thank goodness feminism has been totally discredited. Still, those hard boiled chicks may have a point.  Scrambled, like everything else in our polyglot culture, but a point never-the-less. I just wish I knew what the hell it was.

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