Eggs, rabbits, chicks - and a wooden cross??

I've just read a friend's blog in which she laments that Jesus bloke taking over her birthday celebrations, and I have sympathy because my daughter's birthday is very close to Christmas so it happens to her every year. But that Jesus bloke actually has taken over the original spring festivals - I mean, what have the 'traditional' Easter celebration rites - chocolate eggs, Easter bunnies and chicks - got to do with a torturous death by crucifixion and a resurrection three days later?

The answer of course is: nothing! These accoutrements were appropriated by the early Christians from the pagan spring fertility celebrations. As was much else.

Note, I said the early Christians - not Christ himself. Whoever and whatever Jesus was, I absolve him from any guilt in this regard - I can find no Bible verse in which Jesus holds up a chocolate rabbit and exhorts his followers to eat it in remembrance of him (and if I could find a religious excuse for eating chocolate, believe me, I would!) In fact, there is no instruction in the Bible on how Jesus' death and resurrrection should be celebrated at all.

The clue is in the naming of the festival: Easter is actually an updating of Eostre, the Saxon mother goddess repreesenting fertility. It is from the same root we derive oestrogen, the female hormone. The festival of Eostre was originally a fertility rite in her honour, held to celebrate the return of life to the world in spring.

Thus, eggs and chicks represent new life and rebirth, and of course we all know what rabbits are known for, which is why there are so many of them. Admittedly, go for a walk and you won't see too many, because they scent humans and fear them - probably because they know we are the creatures who inhabit those huge metal machines that tend to squash them if they venture on to roads. But go for a horse ride, and magically there is a hopping rabbit carpet over the field. The hare is also the symbol of the moon and the mother goddess, again representing life and fertility.

Eostre was one of a pantheon of mother / fertility goddesses in various traditions (Aphrodite, Ishtar, Astarte, Venus, Cybele) who represented feminine power as the source of life. In stark contrast to the modern pressure on women to be youthful, thin and passive, these goddesses were portrayed as older, maternal, curvaceous and dominant over their younger lovers, who were seen as gorgeous young men devoted to the service of the divine womb.

In later mystery cults this young male consort took on the role of earlier 'green man'-type gods of fertility; he was portrayed as having been born of a virgin, and represented the cycle of the seasons by dying and returning to life around the spring equinox, usually over a three day period starting with Black Friday. Hmm,sound familiar?

Spring celebrations in older times varied in different places and cultures, but they centred on fun, enjoyment - and often, being fertility rites, sex. When the patriarchal religions took hold they repressed this aspect of the festival along with the celebration of the feminine, but left us with such innocent pleasures as decorating eggs and giving fluffy bunnies and chicks. The naugtiest thing we are left with is chocolate, so excuse me now while I go and celebrate the season by indulging myself with a packet of Lindt mini-eggs...

It’s not a competition…

Last week I received what I now view as a compliment, though once it would have filled me with shame, dread and horror. A friend, normally justly confident with her lovely trim body, was preparing to meet up with us for a meal the other day. Her husband commented that, unusually, she had chosen a high necked top. Her reply was: ‘Maureen will be there – I can’t compete with her cleavage’. Love her, love the comment – thank you very much and good night….

But ‘twas not always so.

I was the ‘good girl’ at school. You would find me in a corner of the library, not hanging out with the cool kids. Throughout my schooldays I received plenty of praise from adults for my intelligence and commitment to study, but little recognition from anyone – least of all my schoolmates – for what really matters to a teenage girl – my looks. I was overweight, spotty – and flat-chested. My best friend, tenth in class tests while I felt let down if I slid to second place, was the boy magnet: skinny, bubbly, extrovert, she clinched the deal by possessing two elder sisters to share clothes and makeup tips – how could I compete?

Consequence: my belief system was created. It said ‘You can to be clever to make up for the fact that you’re unfanciable’.

I now know that we choose our beliefs – back then, they chose me and I blindly accepted. So when my chest suddenly decided to act like it had been attached to an airline my reaction was embarrassment – hide them! It took the appreciation of my husband to make me accept – grudgingly – that my body might actually be, well, sort of OK.

But throughout most of my life, I have been able to accept a compliment about my intelligence with equanimity and genuine pleasure, a personal compliment directed at my appearance has immediately triggered a ‘why is this person saying this?’ response. I looked for a subtext: is it a joke? Blatant empty flattery? What is its purpose? This does not accord with my core belief system: does not compute.

I once (only once!) watched ‘What Not To Wear’ and was horrified at the humiliation of the poor subject, being told she couldn’t wear garment after garment because of her figure. In contrast, I love ‘How To Look Good Naked’ in which Gok Wan, while grabbing bits of flesh, contrives to make women feel proud of what they have. This was perhaps one trigger to help me realise I could choose my own reality.

Another was receiving male attention and appreciation, initially at a time when I was feeling very low for several reasons, and which increased the more confident I became in my appearance, and in a couple of cases at least could not be explained away as anything other than genuine, however hard I tried. Reading Dawn French’s autobiography helped too – I fully identify with her feelings about her boobs, and her confidence boosted mine. (my confidence, not my boobs – they, like Dawn’s, need no further boosting, just good scaffolding!)

I can now accept my body as, to quote a Tim Minchin song, Not Perfect, but it’s mine’, make the most of its good bits and take attention away from the things I don’t like so much. I fully realised how much things had changed last Christmas when a (male) friend who I hadn’t seen for a year commented not only on how good I looked, but on my change of style: skinny jeans, fitted low cut top and leather jacket – clothes I wouldn’t have had the confidence to wear at twenty. So I’m writing this in honour of National Cleavage Day yesterday – I can now celebrate! I no longer feel like I have to compete – but I do finally feel like I’m winning.

Is it my destiny to be fatalistic?

I was born and raised in the flat wilderness that is East Anglia, and proudly - but inaccurately as it turned out - boasted that my pedigree back to the seventeenth century was pure Norfolk with the occasional dash of Suffolk.


Most of the people around me as a child seemed to have a fatalistic attitude to life. I remember one of my Mum's friends - the sort most of us had as children, who we termed Auntie as a mark of respect but no regard at all for bloodlines - on the way to the doctor's for the results of some test (by the Les Dawson impressions she and Mum were doing, mouthing words I wasn't supposed to understand anyway and hitching up bosoms, I guess it was some gynaecological problem) saying in a resigned tone: 'Oh well, if your number's up, that's it.'


My childish mind, even then, baulked at this notion. Oh no, if the grim reaper was coming after me with his scythe I knew how to run and dodge - you don't catch me that way. But then, I'd never been faced with death, or even its possibility, at that stage.

I have still, thankfully, undergone relatively few bereavements, and those such as one might expect in the normal course of events, but even in my limited experience I have been struck with the different attitudes of people to the prospect of death, and they seem to be heavily influenced by whether the person comes from a rural or urban background.

Rural folk, perhaps beause of a genetic history of living close to the elements, engaged in times gone by in agrarian activities and thus dependent for their very survival on the vagaries of wind and sun, seem to me to take a more fatalistic view of death - and life - than those raised in towns and cities.

My father, on receiving a diagnosis of cancer, remarked without any discernable emotion: 'I'll be gone by Christmas'. True to his word, he died in November. Yet a dear old friend kept a body riddled with cancer, thrombosis and various other ailments going till he was nearly 90, mainly because every time - and this was a regular occurrence - he ended up in hospital 'on his death bed', he remembered a few jobs he had to do before he shuffled off this mortal coil... Yes, a Londoner.

Understanding your background influences is the first step to choosing to control them, and either through this or by replacing my rural family fatalism with that of my London-born husband I don't know - but I believe that any experience can be shaped by my brain so that I can take approach it positively.

But this does not stop me enjoying Greek tragedy - or the fatalistic novels of the very rural Thomas Hardy!