Old English and Irish nurses instruct the children, when they have eaten a boiled egg, to push the spoon through the bottom of the shell to hinder the witches from making a boat of it.
It is difficult to ascertain the precise origin of the custom of offering eggs at the festival of Easter. The Persians, the Russians, and the Jews all follow it.
Amongst the Romans the year began at Easter, as it did amongst the Franks under the Capets. Many presents are exchanged, and as an egg is the beginning of all things, nothing better could be found as an offering. Its symbolic meaning is striking. We offer our friends all the blessings contained under that fragile shell, whose fragility represents that of happiness here below. The Romans commenced their repasts with an egg; hence the proverbial phrase, "ab ovo usque ad mala," or, as we still say, "beginning ab ovo."
Another reason given for the Easter egg is that, about the fourth century, the Church forbade the use of eggs in Lent. But as the heretical hens would go on laying, the eggs accumulated to such a degree that they were boiled hard and given away. They were given to the children for playthings, and they dyed them of gay colours. In certain churches in Belgium the priests, at the beginning of a glad anthem, threw the eggs at the choristers who threw them back again, dancing to the music whilst catching the frail eggs that they might not break.
In Germany, where means are more limited than in France, the Easter egg bonbonnière is rare. There are none of the eight-hundred-pound kind, which was made of enamel, and which on its inside had engraved the gospel for the day, while by an ingenious mechanism a little bird, lodged in this pretty cage, sang twelve airs from as many operas.
But in Germany, to make up for this poverty, they have transformed the hare into an oviparous animal, and in the pastry cook's windows one sees this species of hen sitting upright in a nest surrounded by eggs. I have often wondered if that inexplicable saying "a mare's nest," might not have been "a hare's nest." As a lucus a non lucendo it would have done as well. When a German child, at any season of the year, sees a hare run across the field, he says, "Hare, good little hare, lay plenty of eggs for me on Easter day." It is the custom of German families, on Easter eve, to place sugar-eggs and real eggs, the former filled with sugar plums, in a nest, and then to conceal it with dried leaves in the garden that the joyous children may hunt for them on Easter morning.
It is a superstition all over the world that we should wear new clothes on Easter Day. Bad luck will follow if there is not at least one article which is new.
HOW TO ENTERTAIN CHILDREN.
From the realms of old-world story
There beckons a lily hand,