The hometown paper ran a really embarassing story a week or two before Easter about the origins of Easter eggs. Never send a bad reporter to do a historian’s job — the reporter had obviously done some research about the history of Easter eggs, but had apparently stopped when she reached the Middle Ages. So the article was entirely about the Christian origins of Easter eggs, and even included an aside that even non-Christians could enjoy the fine art of coloring and otherwise displaying eggs for Easter.
Well, duh — people have only been mixing eggs and Spring festivals since long before Christ’s birth. When the whole egg coloring schtick became part of Christian celebrations of Easter is hazy, but by the time of the middle ages wealthy individuals were decorating eggs with gold leaf and others were dying eggs various colors.
But come on — does it really take much more than a passing knowledge of religious practices to realize that bunnies, eggs and Spring has a helluva lot more to do with folk and pagan fertility rituals than some lame reinterpretation to fit into a Christian framework? One of the most common Christian reinterpretations his that the egg represents Jesus’ resurrection. Others have it that eggs in Christiandom were often colored red to symbolize the blood of Christ.
The ability of Christianity to incorporate and recycle pretty much any other pre-existing religious ceremony or activity is amazing and one of its strengths (at least if you view the religion functionally), but that same aspect seems to leave many Christians unaware of just how much many of their traditional celebrations owe to non-Christian sources.