Easter Installations - Origins of Easter Traditions

We have been busy over the last few weeks with all the Easter installations, now it's feeling spring like time for the Easter Article I think! The birds are singing and the bulbs are coming up, everyone seems so much more cheerful, although it feels like it we're not quite in Spring yet. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday following the full moon after the vernal equinox on March 21, so Easter falls anywhere between March 22 and April 25 every year.

Origins of Easter:

It is a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, although it has earlier links to Eostre, the Teutonic goddess of spring and fertility. Hares and rabbits were her animals and she is often depicted with a hares head. The Easter celebration actually lasts a long time and starts with Holy Week, which includes Shrove Tuesday & Ash Wednesday (Pancake Day & Mardi Gras) in the run up to Lent which lasts for 40 days and ends on the Easter Monday.

We can see Easter's earlier pagan influence with all the spring like fertility symbols such as rabbits, flowers, chicks and most celebrated in it's chocolate form - the egg! The rabbit comes from a European tradition where children were told that the Oschter Haws bunny would visit and leave colourful eggs in the garden, so children would make nests and hunt for them the next day with baskets. Chocolatiers then later started making chocolate eggs and rabbits to add in to the baskets, which has since taken off all around the world.  Over 90 million chocolate bunnies are made every year!

Of course for the retailer it's all about chocolate sales! The seasonal aisle in supermarkets is almost entirely taken up with boxed Easter eggs, greeting cards and confectionery items. Lots of family's also have a traditional Easter lunch so food sales target the consumer here too, with lamb being a traditional roast.

The installations involve floor and window graphics, hanging signs and gondola end graphics and always look wonderfully fresh and breezy.

An example of an Easter aisle floor graphic being installed: