This past week there has been a lot of discussion about a decision over 4 years ago by the city of Walnut Creek to rename the Easter Bunny. The city web site lists “Breakfast with the Spring Bunny” and “Spring Egg Hunts.” The local paper mentions a reader editorial letter that started a nation-wide discussion of the elimination of the Easter Bunny.
Some of the critics of this decision see it as another attempt to eliminate religion, especially Christianity, from public life, similar to changing “Merry Christmas” to “Happy Holidays.” They are probably right about the motivation for renaming the famous rabbit. Walnut Creek, the East Bay San Francisco wanna be, is eager to be politically correct. But now there is a new blog named Friends of the Easter Bunny which is dedicated to fighting this change in Walnut Creek. It claims in a post on 3/8/07 that an an e-mail signed by city manager Gary Pokorny has renamed the celebration “The spring equinox celebration of vernal rebirth.” Strange!
For myself, I am actually happy to see the bunny de-linked from Easter. The whole bunny and egg thing really has absolutely nothing to do with the death and resurrection of Jesus, and in fact has a completely pagan origin. We can let the secularists have the spring bunny, and we can focus on “Resurrection Day” as it is called in Chinese (a much better name than the pagan word “Easter.”)