Happy Easter Weekend!

The First Foundation Team hopes that you are having a pleasant and relaxing Easter long weekend."

For a bit of fun, here’s some Easter Trivia for you!

• Unlike most other holidays, Easter is a “moveable feast” as it is held on a different date every year between March 22 and April 25, following the Paschal full moon on or after March 21.

• The name, Easter, is believed by some sources to come from Eostra (or Ostara), the pagan goddess of spring and fertility

• The Easter tradition of exchanging eggs may go back to the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Persians and Gauls, for whom the egg symbolized life.

• The largest Easter egg in Canada, and in the world until 2008, is a pysanka—a Ukranian-style Easter egg sculpture in Vegreville, Alberta. Created in 1975 to pay homage to the Ukranian immigrants in that region, it is 31 feet long and weighs 5,512 pounds.

• The Easter Egg Roll is a yearly tradition that takes place on the front lawn of the White House. President Rutherford B. Hayes began this tradition in 1878 and it has run every year since then except for the World War I and World War II years.

• In Germany in the 1800s, courts of law recognized Easter eggs dyed and inscribed with an individual’s birth date and name as a legal birth certificate.

• One theory of where the egg-decorating tradition came from is that eggs were once forbidden during Lent, thus people would paint and decorate the eggs to represent the ending of Lent and the beginning of the Easter celebration. They would then eat them on Easter as a special treat.

Also – I heard a DJ on the radio on Friday remarking that if it’s eggs that are being hidden on Easter morning, how come it’s not an Easter Chicken instead of the Easter bunny? Bunnies don’t lay eggs! However, if I may go all Cliff Clavin on this guy, well, it’s a little know fact, Sammy, that there is indeed a mythical, egg laying bunny – a hare to be precise.

The symbolic animal, or totem, of the Goddess Eostre is a hare—and according to the story, she could turn herself into hare at will. In one legend, the goddess comes upon an injured bird, who she saves by turning it into a hare, like her. Yet, having been a bird, this hare could still lay eggs, and in gratitude to the goddess, the bird laid colored eggs on her feast day ever since.

Happy Easter!