Monday 9 April 2012

The Easter Bunny & Others of his Ilk

So why was it that people thought that rabbits brought us eggs at Easter? The answer is they didn't, near enough everybody assumes that the Easter bunny is a rabbit when in fact the original Easter bunny is a hare, this will help explain this curious notion a little. Remember this is from the time when people thought flies had 4 legs, barnacle geese hatched from goose barnacles & cuckoos turned into hawks in winter. The reason why is makes slightly better sense it being a hare is that unlike rabbits hares don't burrow but create forms which is a scrape in the ground lined with grass to create a sort of nest for its young, abandoned forms make good nests for lapwings so occasionally have eggs in them, so it would make sense to them somehow, after all they didn't know as much about species & the ins & outs of the reproductive cycle as well back then. So to the Mad March Hare, people see them boxing in the field around this time of the year, it was originally thought it was males competing for a mate, another misconception as it is a male & female, with the female saying the equivalent of 'not now I have a headache, leave me alone you freak, I said no' clunk as she bitch slaps him in the kisser. There is also the lunar associations with the hare as people used to say you can see the hare in the moon, the are a fair few cultures that say this, though myself I have never seen this, perhaps I should look at the moon without my glasses on but then I'll end up seeing 2 blurry moons & you tell me you could see the entire works of Shakespeare on there & I probably wouldn't argue, that is more to do interpretation of lines in people's heads more than anything, but it is a good thing to tell children as they still have that kind of imagination & magic & you can tell them that are mimicking their friend the Moon Gazing Hare looking at his friend. Ah what it would be like to have that innocence again, it is all too fleeting as they grow up too quickly these days & stop believing at a younger age in such things.

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