Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Easter Eggs

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why Easter eggs are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Easter eggs, known for being colorful, famous for being Christian somehow. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Easter eggs are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name's Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes! What is your relationship to or opinion of Easter eggs? I'm so good at hunting Easter eggs. I'm so good at hunting Easter eggs. I was very good as a child. I was very skilled at hunting for the eggs and my poor older brother, he just was not, he couldn't keep

up with me and I would snatch them all and my parents would be like, now Katie, maybe slow down a little bit. I'd just be zooming around, getting all the eggs, spiking them down in the end zone. You know, just like, I was a fiend. I was a little fiend for eggs. We had a very similar sibling situation because I was the slower older sibling and then my younger brother who is excellent at scientific observation like you were. He was excellent at Easter eggs.

So eggs. I can see this. It's like the egg sense. The eggs factor. So yes, no, I loved making Easter eggs. I loved hunting them. I was neutral about eating them. It's, I never liked the yolks as a kid.

I would eat the egg whites, but I didn't like the yolks. And then I discovered as an adult, the reason I didn't like the yolks is that for the Easter egg to be firm, they would be boiled quite a bit of time. And so the yolk would be sort of this, like it all had that gray film around it, be that very chalky, almost yellowish white color.

And that was like too done for me. And I just assumed I did not like egg yolks. And then as an adult, I had ramen for the first time. And I was like, what? This is an egg? I, yeah, no, I was just like, it was a transcendent experience of like, I did not realize eggs could be this way.

I could be so delicious. That's cool. I like the entire egg. I do still miss doing like every Easter. I'm like, you know, I would, I'd like decorate an egg. I'd be down for that. Yeah. And I don't like hard boiled eggs.

So I've never eaten an Easter egg. Really? Yeah. I have to, I have to give you egg. Have you had the eggs in ramen where it's like... They're not that good, yeah. Ah, you don't like the eggs with the molten sort of... I give Brenda my half an egg and yeah.

Okay, okay. Well, if you don't like the ramen egg with the molten center, I don't know what to tell you. I don't know what can be done for you. This topic is vast. I want to say that eggs, chicken eggs can be done for you. This topic is vast. I want to say that like eggs, chicken eggs could be their own episode. We haven't done a chickens episode either. The Easter bunny could be its own episode.

The video game concept of an Easter egg is like a metaphor could be its own episode. I don't know if the holiday of Easter could be an episode because that's just kind of a world religions major holiday. I don't know if that's quite the show. But like- I think if we did that, we'd have to do go for the little ones like Arbor Day, Flag Day. That's much better. Yeah.

Yeah. Because that's the other thing. Like in my dad's Catholic Church and my mom's Presbyterian Church, everyone was very clear that Christmas and Easter are the two big ones. Like I don't know if non-Christians know this, that like his birth at Christmas is a big deal and then his death and resurrection at Easter is a big deal. And those are the clear pillars of the year. And also thank you to many folks for suggesting this on Discord, in particular Alex R and Takoop Bear, because it's like a nice timely episode. This is the Monday before both Catholic and Orthodox Easter on this year's calendar, April 20th. I guess

that's a number. But let's get into more numbers and stats. And this week that is in a segment called Monday You Can Do the Math, Tuesday, Wednesday, count the stats. Thursday, don't ignore the facts. It's Friday. I love stats. You got the nice Liverpool accent there. I think I turned the cure into Ringo Starr? Sorry.

Anyway, that name was submitted by Fiona Sapp. Thank you, Fiona. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Miss Sillian Wacky best possible. Submit through Discord or to sippot at gmail.com. And the like origin of Easter eggs has some vagueness to it and will be a giant takeaway later. The first numbers are about modern stuff and the first number is five hundred and one thousand Easter eggs. Whoa. Slightly over half a million.

That's a lot. That's a lot of eggs. Yeah, that's the alleged amount of eggs in the Easter egg hunt at Cypress Gardens Adventure Park in 2007. The Guinness Book of World Records is not like an actual source of information, but this is the closest anyone has come to a biggest Easter egg hunt of all time in 2007 in Florida. Okay. Cypress Gardens is in Florida. Is this like a theme park or a public garden?

It's like a botanical garden that they tried to also rebrand as sort of an adventure park, almost a theme park. It's in Winter Haven, Florida. And shortly after this event, they closed down. And then the next year they got bought up by people opening a Florida Lego land. So that place is now just like the botanical gardens of Florida Lego land. Did they go completely broke buying all those eggs? They had declared a form of bankruptcy the year before, and it seems like they were just trying to come up with a way to stay in business. So they tried to do the biggest Easter egg hunt of all time. They declared egg rupture?

Yep. I don't know. I don't know if that deserved to chuckle, but that's wild. They were jumping the shark here. I get the sense that they were just swinging for the fences to try to stay in business and that's why hid slightly over half a million eggs. And they were hunted for by nearly 10,000 children. So that's more than 50 eggs per kid. That's pandemonium.

I'm thinking of like the 300 movie of children just kicking each other and eggs flying. Were these real eggs or were they the plastic eggs? Apparently they're plastic. Okay, that makes sense. The other source here is a blog called the Disneyblog.com. It's a really solid Disney fan site. A fan of those kind of parks named John Frost attended this hunt. And he says that there were just so many eggs

that they were extraordinarily easy to find. Like they didn that there were just so many eggs that they were extraordinarily easy to find. Like they didn't actually hide half a million eggs, they just scattered half a million plastic eggs across the park. They do just like get a helicopter and dump all these eggs. Yeah, like it was just a mess. And he says that his kids had a good time, but they stayed at the park for the day. And like toward closing time, staff were still cleaning up thousands of eggs that kids had not picked up.

It was just chaos. I don't know. That kind of disgusts me in a way because like, it's so much plastic. It's so much plastic. It's so much plastic. And I don't know. Did you have strong opinions as a kid of like real eggs versus plastic for hunting?

I liked both. A quick number there is the year 1880. That's around when a Newark, New Jersey drugstore owner named William Townley started selling little packets of artificial dye. And that was the beginning of a brand called, I've always heard it pronounced PAS, P-A-A-S. Yes, I'm familiar with that. And that's been like a long time US home kit for dyeing Easter eggs brand, like dyeing

chicken eggs. But I'm also into plastic eggs, especially because they'll be hollow and have a prize inside. So I really am up for both. It's great. I was such a traditionalist as a kid because I, for some reason, even though I didn't love the egg yolk, there's something about the weight of a real egg and sort of the organicness of a real egg.

It made it feel more magical somehow. Also, because of the... I also use the POS die kits. Like every year my mom would get that. It'd have like the cartoon bunnies on it. All the little instructions. It had the little pill tablets that you put in little cups and you'd put water and a little bit of vinegar in them. And... And the weird wire scoop. And the weird wire scoop. Where it's just like a little ring that you cradle the egg wire scoop. And the weird wire scoop. Where it's just like a little ring that you cradle the egg in.

That was so weird. Yeah, you'd like dunk. So that you wouldn't have to dunk your fingies in the dye water. And it would always come with those crayons where it's like, yeah, this is a wax crayon, so if you do a design on it and then dunk it, like the ink won't, the dye won't stick to it, but it never really worked that well. So it just.

I'm also gonna link, Wirecutter says that they do not recommend the POS brand today and that it doesn't dye as good as other options, but also I like it because I'm a traditionalist, so. There was a year, I think my mom got a different one and those eggs were so vibrant and it was like, whoa, okay. Oh, well, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I really, I enjoyed the egg dyeing process

and I liked the actual chicken cloaca produced eggs as a kid, despite the fact that the plastic eggs might have a little prize inside. It's like, I much preferred like all the chocolates to just no nonsense, be in the basket and the eggs to be real. And I was very stalwart about that. I was always disappointed by an egg hunt

where there was all the little plastic eggs. It's like, I don't feel the weight of creation in this egg. I don't feel like this egg could have been an embryo. This is what I crave as a child. Yeah, especially like as a kid you're told not to play with food and also you're told eggs are delicate, you're clumsy, don't touch that. So like it is kind of transgressive in a fun way that you're handling chicken eggs, you know? You don't get to do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you don't get to just mess around with chicken eggs. Yeah, that's great. Unless you're a farm kid or something. Unless you're a farm child. And then I imagine you being very solemn in your little suspenders and coveralls. Like the American Gothic, but a four-year-old. All the other egg hunt kids are running around and the farm kids just like, good harvest today. Like just some kind of old man somehow.

Storms are coming. I can feel it in my loose baby teeth. And then another kind of topic here is I feel like there's chicken eggs, plastic eggs, and then also a category of candy that is Easter egg shaped or fully has a plastic egg in it. The key number there is a fine of $2,500 US dollars per egg. Oh, is that? Oh, can I guess? Can I guess? Can I guess? Can I guess? Sure. Was this for the Kinder Surprise controversy? Yeah, I remember that because it's like a chocolate egg and inside were little toys

and the company got into a bit of hot water because the kids were eating. I don't know why I did that. Kinder Surprise is a German company, right? Yeah, it's like German and Italian apparently, yeah. Ziffer and a bit of hot water. Yeah, it's like German and Italian apparently. Yeah, yeah. Zip it in a bit of hot water.

And so, because for some reason I mixed them up with Cadbury eggs, so I did the British accent. Anyways, children were choking on the little toys in the Choco Eggs and the company got super in trouble. Yes. Yeah. And this fine, it's not for the company. It's two men in Washington state in 2015 imported Kinder Surprise Eggs into the United States and they were fined $2,500

per egg for violating US customs. It is illegal to bring Kinder Surprise Eggs into the United States. It was like a black market operation because you know those kinder loves those surprises and they'll pay a lot of money for that on the chocolate market. Like almost yeah. Like on the brown market is that what it's called? The brown web. Yeah. It brown web. It doesn't sound like, but you know, like chocolate, like chocolate, guys. Come on. Yeah, apparently candy makers in Italy were the first to make surprise eggs in 1974. And then the Kinder brand has become the big one.

And this is, it's like a chocolate coating around a plastic egg. And then that plastic egg is hollow and contains a toy. So it's chocolate and plastic all together and near your mouth. And unlike Canada, unlike Mexico, unlike most other countries, the United States does not allow the importation of them. The US Customs calls them a choking and aspiration hazard. And then there's also a pretty much black market of people bringing them into the US, especially to make YouTube videos for American audiences where they open it and show you

what's inside. Yeah, I've seen plenty of Kinder Surprise eggs here. Also, one of the reasons I think probably Italy came up with these is Italy also has, like, they don't really do the chocolate Easter bunny. They do chocolate eggs, big ones, like an ostrich egg. Cool. We got a fancy one and it had like, here's a wooden tic-tac-toe set.

And it was like, this is, I don't know, give me like a little action figure Easter bunny with like a gun or something, I don't know. Anyways, but yeah, like the giant eggs, I don't really see Easter chocolate bunnies here, almost at all. I see the giant eggs. I don't really see Easter chocolate bunnies here almost at all. I see the chocolate eggs. Sometimes chocolate chickens, sometimes little like chocolate bunnies, but mostly it is the big eggs that is the thing.

That makes sense. And I don't have like stats for it, but it seems like there's a broad cultural difference between the US and other countries that celebrate Easter where we're just kind of behind on wild egg chocolate candy technology. I'm going to link the Guardians run down from last year of like new British chocolate egg candies with all kinds of different prizes and gizmos and stuff. With even more choking hazards. In 2024, the Guardian featured Waitrose's The Cracking Pistachio, where there's chocolate

around a pistachio, but also it's Easter-y. There was Hotel Chocolat's Extra Thick Egg, which is milk to caramel. There's a lot of chocolate egg with further chocolate eggs inside it. They're really doing things we're just not up to here because we've rejected the surprise egg. The other like US panic number here is March 2025. In March 2025, a TikTok user sparked a panic about Reese's eggs. Uh oh, that's now. March 2025 is now. Yeah. Alex, what's wrong with Reese's eggs? So nothing. Can I panic a little bit?

Yeah, sure. Have a little panic, you know, as a treat. Okay, I'm done. Yeah, good. So a TikTok user, and this seems to be either mostly or entirely false. A TikTok user claimed that they used to work at Hershey in the 2010s and they learned that the company refuses to transport Reese's eggs by air.

A Reese's egg, it's basically just a peanut butter cup, but egg shape, that's it. But they claim that Hershey's does this because the contents of the package cannot handle air travels, pressure changes, and not just that the package will burst, but it'll be like a violent explosion of chocolate. Like not flames, but like they were like, you can't fly these. So it would take the whole plane down. Yeah. And the Daily Dot says this is at minimum a massive exaggeration. Apparently air pressure can make food packaging break, like just open, but it won't like go boom, you know? You cannot turn a peanut butter egg into an IED is what they're saying.

The other thing is they checked and yes, Hershey's tends not to ship Reese's Eggs by air because they don't fly most of their chocolate. It just doesn't make economic sense. Like trucks, trains, boats. Like it would cost too much money. Bunnies. With baskets, yeah.

Yeah. But this TikTok briefly made people think that like they'll die if they bring a Reese's egg on a plane. So that's yet another US terror about chocolate Easter egg candy. I just think that requires a little bit of critical thinking. Could an egg be so... It is chocolate filled with peanut butter. How could the...

Because now, because it's like you could put peanut butter on a door handle. It's like any minute now I'm going to break into this bank because I've slathered the vault with peanut butter. I'm in. Yeah. That's very silly. Don't worry about candy so much. And there's like too many creative kinds of Easter eggs to name. We'll just list a few. Also, if you want to see a bunch of them, the number is over 900 kinds of Easter eggs. That's the amount of eggs in the collection of the Easter Egg Museum in Sonnenbue, Germany. They have everything from historical Easter eggs to like modern Coca-Cola promo Easter eggs. There's a whole museum of them. Wow.

Easter eggs are pretty global across the Christian world. And there's a lot of unique spins on it. One to highlight is cascarones. The cascaron is a special tradition in Texas and Mexico and that part of North America. A Smithsonian Folklife magazine says that you start by coloring the outside of an egg, but you also hollow out the chicken egg by making a hole to drain out the liquid contents. And then you, through the hole, fill it with confetti, lock the hole with tissue paper, and the last and very joyful step is smashing it

on the top of somebody else's head. Awesome, I love that. So they're showered in confetti and eggshell. I know how to do that, by the way, the hollowing out the egg, because you do two little holes, one on the top, one on the bottom, and then you blow through it. And I've done that for making Ukrainian eggs, where you use the wax and the multiple dipping methods.

That was the other one to bring up, because yeah, it turns out especially Orthodox churches and people in Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, other countries, they have amazing long-standing egg decoration traditions. Yeah. Ukraine, it's called Pisanky, I think it's pronounced. Yes. That's so cool you've done that. It's really fun. I would love to try to do it again, but it's actually pretty difficult for me to find because like you need a little stylus that it's like a wooden dowel with a little metal cup part that you put wax in,

and then you melt the wax, and then you use that to draw a design on the egg. So the way you are layering a much stronger dye than the past dye, it's like a serious dye for permanent, not for eating because these eggs don't get eaten because they're hollowed out and they don't go bad. They last for quite a while actually, like indefinitely unless you break them.

Cool. Start doing the design and you start dunking the egg and each time you like do a design, it locks in that color. So if you want a white layer, you do that first. And then if you want, and you go from light to dark. So if you want, you start with doing a design and whatever you just drew will be white on the plain egg. Then maybe you do yellow, then maybe you do orange or pink or red, and then so on and so on. And you're adding layers of the wax design each time, which locks in that new layer of darker color until you often like

it's finished off with a black layer, maybe a really dark blue layer, and then you, you know, that's it. And then you use, you put the egg, this is the really fun part, you put the egg over like a flame and then all the wax melts off and as the wax is melting off, you see your design of all the colors being revealed. It's really, really cool. That's awesome. My eggs looked terrible, but in the hands of an expert, they look really cool. That's awesome. My eggs looked terrible, but in the hands of an expert, they look really cool. Yeah, we'll link pictures of nice ones. It's absolutely extraordinary, I think, that I've never even approached doing. We just made them kind of one or two colors,

Max, those kids. It's so fun. It's so fun. And that's awesome. And it's a very long-running tradition because like wax and especially natural dyes, you could do that earlier in history. That's a cool thing. Yeah. Yeah. The last number here, it's just 40 days. That's the length of a Christian religious time period called Lent. We're not going to break down all of Easter, but in super general terms, Lent is a 40-day period of time that represents Jesus fasting and suffering in a desert as Satan tempted him. It includes states like Palm Sunday.

Metal. Sorry. It is. It's like, you want a sandwich, Jesus? No, I am fasting, Satan. This one's a BLT. Oh God. That's kind of it.

But no. Yeah, that's pretty much it. And yeah, and then there's Palm Sunday in there, there's Good Friday in there. Good Friday is at least the Catholic name for Jesus's crucifixion and death. Easter Sunday is the holiday for his resurrection. Date changes year to year, varies across denominations. And it all kind of begs the question, why Easter eggs? Because none of that story involves eggs, all that specifically. Yeah. And so let's explore that with mega takeaway number one. Eggs are both a Christian symbol of Easter and a global symbol of creation. This is something that Christian people have run with

and also comes from kind of a lot of mythologies involving an egg in a creation story that seems to be one of the roots of Easter eggs. Isn't that like a big thing in like creation myths? Like the world was born out of an egg, like a giant egg. It turns out like kind of globally, or at least in a lot of Asia, Europe, like the same area that Christianity came out of.

I think eggs are just very fascinating. Any kind of egg laying animal, it is so strange you have this thing and it looks like a rock or something inert. And then a little like gross pink little bird pops out or a little snake or a fish, right? I think it kind of would be so fascinating, especially like before we had all of the information

about how the stages of an embryo or something, it must've been just like so interesting. Of course, I'm sure that early people like would crack open an egg before it's like done and kind of see some of the earlier stages of the chicken embryos. And that must've been so wild to see this like weird, alien looking creature in it.

So I mean, I think it's very natural for us to have based a lot of religious, cultural, spiritual things around eggs because they are really fascinating. Exactly. Yeah, it's just a neat thing that most people can observe. And they're delicious, except for Alex. I cook them the other ways. It's great.

So you do like scrambled eggs? Oh yeah, yeah. I think hard boiled is one of the only ways I don't like it. Yeah. Man. Yeah, I'm weird. There's a lot of sources here, writing by Brett Landau, lecturer in religious studies at University of Texas Austin, writing by Toc Thompson, professor of anthropology and

folklore at USC. Also like a loose source here, if people are fans of Alan Watts, the popular philosopher, he wrote a book in 1950 called Easter, Its Story and Meaning. If you want to get deep on some vibey thoughts about Easter, I mostly used him as a starting point, but it was helpful. Egg vibes. Yeah, egg vibes. Yeah.

We'll also link a digital upload of writing by the early Christian saint Augustine of Hippo. With Easter Eggs and the Easter Bunny, you will find blogs and stuff that tell you there's one definite reason that's a tradition. We don't really know any of that. We just have potential roots and guesses. And the two things we're sure of are that many cultures connected eggs with the creation of the world long before Jesus and before Christianity. And the other thing is early Christians connected

eggs with Jesus, especially in like a biological way. So Easter eggs kind of have a long tradition. Oh, that's interesting. Something to do with maybe like immaculate conception? Yeah, like Jesus and Mary, there's a lot of fertility reproduction stuff in their story. And then also one really key Christian saint used eggs as a metaphor for hope. This Saint Augustine of Hippo. He was the bishop of a place called Hippo Regis. That's why it sounds like he hangs out with hippopotamuses. Full of hippos. Yeah.

He lived in the 300s and 400s AD. That's shortly after the Roman Empire made Christianity a state religion. It's very early in the process of Christianity spreading. His writings, his letters, they get spread throughout the whole Christian world. Here's an English translation of part of a Latin sermon by Augustine, quote, there remains hope, which as I think is compared to an egg, for hope has not yet arrived at attainments and an egg is something but not yet the chicken. Hmm.

Yeah, I get it. Yeah. And then he goes on to compare it to like mammals go ahead and give birth to a young one. Birds give birth to the hope of a young one in his metaphor. And so him being such a pillar of this, he and other people start to build out egg metaphors for Jesus and for Mary. Because Jesus is a symbol of hope, so is an egg.

Mary is a symbol of birth and fertility and reproduction, so is an egg. Eggs get tied to pretty much the two main figures, especially in Catholic churches. So much stuff is named after Mary. It's a big thing. This reminds me of the teachings of Saint Shrek of Far Far Away, who once compared being an ogre to being an onion. Alex, I don't know why you're laughing. So the metaphor works because the onion has layers as does an ogre. So it's actually really profound.

Just chuckling about all those churches have been to with big pictures of Shrek. Oh, what a time. There's also an early Christian metaphor of eggs representing the Holy Trinity. Because people just decided this makes sense. They said that an egg has three parts, the yolk, the white, and the shell. And the Trinity is God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit. Yeah, it also has a membrane though. So it also has some other parts, but all right, yeah, I get it. Right, like the egg decision is fine, but also you could break it down more. But that

became another way. Like I really assumed Easter eggs came out of like the 1950s or something, but no, this is a very, very old thing, that eggs have some connection to early Christians. That makes sense. I think that this would be something that would be fascinating to us. Also because we've been probably eating eggs as food for so long.

They're such delicious little nutrition packets that anything that provides us with food is probably going to become part of our culture. So that makes sense to me. And yeah, and then medieval Christians with these early ideas plus eggs being great food, eggs actually became an important item during Lent and during the Easter season. I think some people know that some Christians don't let themselves eat meat during Lent

or they give it up on Fridays or something. A lot of medieval Christians also gave up eggs in the process and then celebrated Easter Sunday by beginning to eat meat and eggs again. There was also a tradition in medieval France where when children gave their first confession to a priest, they would do it on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter. As part of that, they gave the priest a gift of eggs. Just the valuableness of eggs and this old metaphorical lore about eggs made them continue to be a Christian item, especially during Lent and Easter.

Here is an egg in these trying times. It reminds me of Stardew Valley or something. Like here's an egg and they're like, thanks. It reminds me of Frank Reynolds on It's Always Sunny Philadelphia. Yeah, that too. and it's always so in Philadelphia. Yeah, that too. It is interesting, the connection of eggs to Jesus and Christianity, because birds who are, perhaps most famous egg layers,

although there's a lot of animals that lay eggs, they are capable of parthenogenesis, meaning like immaculate conception. So like there are birds that are born without, yes. Like it's been documented in chickens, it's been documented in vultures where on rare occasions, a bird is born without, from an unfertilized egg essentially.

So it's like very rare, but it's possible. So there are these like Jesus chickens or Jesus condors that have been born without any any sex happening. And the only reason we know about it in chickens and vultures is that chickens we know because they're domesticated and we track, you know, like, hey, there's nary a rooster for miles and somehow this chicken had a live chick. And for the condors, we were tracking their populations through genetic tests and stuff because they were endangered. And we found like, ah, yeah, this one had a, a unfertilized chick upon testing. So they're usually not as healthy and often they don't make it all the way through to adulthood because of the genetic shenanigans.

But yeah, I mean, there was no way we knew about this back when we came up with sort of the connection to Christianity and to Jesus. But I find that interesting. Right, right. Yeah, it's a coincidence. That's amazing. Yeah. Or lucky or somehow somebody observed it. Or Jesus. Or Jesus did it. Or lucky or somehow somebody observed it. Or Jesus, or Jesus did it. Or Jesus. Or Jesus.

The other Jesus part of this is his blood was an influence on early dying of eggs. Like there was some of the first died eggs for Easter, they were just died red, partly because we could make red dyes a lot of ways. And apparently in the modern country of Georgia and West Asia, there's a long Georgian tradition of gathering for an Easter feast in your local cemetery, like sitting among the graves and picnicking for Easter. They dye the eggs a bright red color to match Jesus' blood and the graveyard reflects his death. That's pretty metal, Alex, I gotta say.

I'm linking Atlas Obscura for pictures of people doing it. It's great. It's a very dudes hanging out, having a cemetery feast thing that I get a kick out of. I shouldn't say dudes, it's whole families. Why am I saying dudes? I'm a dude, you're a dude, we're all dudes. But I think it's interesting because a lot of the actual Christian traditions that would happen across the globe over many years,

if you showed that to fundamentalist, nosy person these days, a busybody, they'd be like, oh, that's satanic. And it's like, no, that's just a Christian's having a good time in the graveyard with their Jesus blood eggs. Right, right. It's old Easter stuff. Yeah, which I think is really cool.

The other piece of lore they developed with red eggs ties to Mary Magdalene, who's not Mary Jesus' mother. It's a woman who was either friends with him or possibly romantic with him. People debate it. Yeah. Tom Hanks gets real upset about that whole argument in that one movie. The Da Vinci egg? Yeah. Yeah, the Da Vinci egg. People, as they died eggs red, they tied it into a piece of lore that's not really in the Bible's text. In the Gospels, they say that Mary Magdalene was one of the people who visit Jesus' tomb

and discover that his body's not there. But they basically developed extra lore that she brought food when she went. And that when they discovered Jesus' body was not there, the eggs she brought miraculously turned blood red. Is some like extra lore they developed. Why did she bring the food? She wanted a little snack when she was visiting his dead body? Pretty much. Okay. Yeah, pretty much. Was she going to like try to feed him? Like, hey Jesus, are you sleeping? Like, come on, have an egg.

It's like bringing a Nature Valley bar or something. Like it's that vibe. I feel like if I had a savior and I had to hike out to their tomb, I would probably, an egg would not be a bad idea. I might bring an empanada. That's like my go-to hiking snacko. Cause like it's got, sometimes it even has eggs in it.

Sure, that's a great idea. Egg panadas. And yeah, with this being so old, snacko, because sometimes it even has eggs in it. Sure. That's a great kind. Egg pinatas. And yeah, with this being so old, that's why especially Orthodox churches and Catholic churches did some of the first Easter egg decorating and why places like Ukraine have amazing artistic traditions around it, because they just did it earlier than the later Protestant churches and other groups. But yeah, this is surprisingly old.

It's great. Yeah, that's so interesting. I love that. The other remaining question is why eggs specifically? Because there are other Easter traditions with other foods, like sacrificing meat during Lent, giving that up. Also, there's a few big traditions around bread. People have made hot cross buns for Good Friday because you can make a cross shape on a bun. Good Friday is the crucifixion day. I'm also going to link Atlas Obscura about

the village of San Biagio in Sicily where they build a church out of bread every year for Easter, like a building. It's nuts. I can't believe it. Wait, you can walk into it? Yeah. I should have sent you pictures. It's nuts. I can't believe it. Wait, you can walk into it? Yeah, it's, I should have sent you pictures. It's not like a little one. It's like a whole, there's like arches of bread, people walk through, it's wild. Yeah, there's a few reasons eggs became a fixture. It's partly that you can hunt them or chase them or do egg rolls like at the White House.

I'm sorry, I'm distracted by the bread cathedral. You just dropped the bread cathedral and you tried to move past it. And I'm looking at a freaking pillar made out of bread with filigrees and motifs also made out of bread. It's just going on, right. So like why eggs instead of that, you know? It's still a good question. It's a bread cathedral.

There's arches made out of bread. They really go wild. It's a lot of bread. There's a chandelier made out of bread. Alex. Yeah, you should go. I wanna, I do, I gotta go to the bread church. I'm gonna become a- A breaditarian? I'm gonna become a, yeah, a bread church, I'm going to become a… A breaditarian? I'm going to become a, yeah, a breaditarian, a loyal and faithful servant to bread Christ.

Yeah, and like, I did not know how pervasive world egg myths are. The global tradition of creation stories involving a cosmic egg or a world egg. Let's list five of them. Okay. A lot of these cultures had a few different stories of creation, but one Egyptian story is that in ancient Egypt, an ancient god called Geb, who represents the earth and is male, did something with the goddess Nut, who represents the sky and is female. And Gabba Nut created a world egg out of which came the Bennu bird, aka a phoenix. And phoenixes have also been represented with

Christ. Did something with her, huh, Alex? Yeah, and her name's Nut, so you can put it together. When a male god and a female goddess love each other very much, they have a special handshake that they do and then they create the world. For a world egg, yeah. And yeah, a lot of Christian art also used phoenixes for Jesus because he dies and resurrects. Phoenixes do that in mythology. So that could be one influence. Meanwhile, in Hindu mythology, one creation story involves a world egg forming from the waters of chaos. It splits in half

to be the earth and the sky. The Phoenician culture of the Mediterranean that we've talked about on a few episodes, especially about the alphabet, their mythology had an egg form in primeval waters called mot, that also split in half to be the earth and the sky. If you jump to Finland, whoa, Finland, they had a pre-Christian culture. We're in Finland now. Oh, panic. The pre-Christian culture of Finland had an epic runic poem about the creation of the

world that featured a duck. Fantastic. It's a species called a teal, a duck. Yeah, I've seen those. Those are pretty. They're cool ducks, yeah. And this Finnish creation story is that the broken eggs of a teal were turned into the earth, sun, sky, moon, and clouds. And that happened because

this duck was sent by a highest god named Uco to nest upon the knee of the water mother. There's just tons of like egg and water makes the world. The last example here, this is debatable and Alan Watts says not everybody buys into it, but the original text of the book of Genesis in the Bible might be influenced by or hint at an egg in waters. Because the second verse of the whole Bible, Genesis chapter one verse two, most translations say something along the lines of the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And the Spirit of God, if it's a Trinitarian thing, if we're New Testament about it, the Spirit of God could be the Holy Spirit, which is usually represented by a dove, like a bird. Watts also says that action verbs of moved upon can also be translated

as brooded over. So the line could say a dove laid an egg in the waters. Man, why don't they just say so? Because you know, doves are a species of a type of pigeon and pigeons are notoriously bad at creating any kind of fanciness. They really just like, they'll find a ledge and they'll be like, put one stick down. I'm serious. They'll like put one stick down, lay their egg right on that ledge and be like, done, job done. Number one mom, number one dad. It all fits. So, another reason fans of Jesus might have looked to eggs is this old lore. Fans of Jesus. And the one separate holiday to mention is Passover. Because it's a totally different holiday about a

different story, but it's around the same time of year and it often features a hard-boiled egg in the seder and often features a hunting activity with the afikamen, which is not an egg. It's like matzah wrapped in a little napkin. Yeah, so like that also might reflect how pervasive egg stories and hunting games are in cultures and be another hint as to the origin of Easter eggs in Christianity. I was a lot worse at that. Like, we did also celebrate Passover. But like, with the matzah wrapped up in the napkin, somehow that one was, that would elude me much more than the eggs. Maybe because it's less of a bird thing.

Yeah, I think it was less, it was, yeah. Like there's something, like I am like, yeah, yeah. I'm primed for bird, I'm a bird watcher by blood. So like if you put an egg somewhere or a bird somewhere, I will find it. Yeah, yeah. And we, yeah, we love a hunting game. Like if you put an egg somewhere or a bird somewhere, I will find it. Yeah. Yeah. And we, yeah, we love a hunting game.

We love an egg. So like Easter eggs are both very Christian and also probably have old roots going way, way, way back. So it's fun. Yeah. This is such a vast takeaway. I had a lot of numbers. We are going to take a quick break, then explore two more takeaways about surprisingly lavish Easter egg traditions.

La la. Anything more impressive than the Bread Cathedral? Uh, almost. But also, no. It's amazing. Even so, the Bread Cathedral, everybody, if you can. Oh my god. Support for today's show comes from the UNC Keenan-Flagler Business School and their Master of Accounting program. Because if you thrive on diving into the details, which describes everybody listening to this show, your curiosity makes you a great fit for a career in accounting. No matter the state of the job market,

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You could be a tar heel in less than one year. Learn more at accounting.unc.edu. We are back and we're back with a very lavish takeaway number two. Before that, how do they keep pigeons away from the Bread Cathedral? I assume they don't. I think it's just great to be a Sicilian pigeon. It's so good. Lasers.

Drones. All right, go ahead. The mafia. Takeaway number two. Yeah, the good feathers can have it, but otherwise. The good feathers. There we go. That's a deep cut.

Here's our very lavish takeaway number two. The final Russian Tsars wasted a lot of their final money on Easter eggs. It turns out the top tier of Fabergé eggs were specifically Easter presents. I thought they were just randomly eggs. It turns out that the 50 Imperial eggs, the top category of Fabergé eggs, were Easter presents for the Russian Tsars. Yeah, that might have been a little bit of an oopsie-goofer for them. Yeah, and we don't have their entire budget to work from, but just the last few Tsars

get overthrown while they're purchasing as many silly jeweled eggs as possible. The serfs are becoming very violent. They have depicted you sort of with your head removed. Is that you want to do something about that? I must collect the most pretty egg. Yeah, yeah. The key sources here are two sets of museum digital resources, one from the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California, another from the UK's Royal Collection Trust.

And yeah, this ties into especially Orthodox Christianity having an early Easter egg design tradition and that Pisanky in Ukraine we talked about. Russia has its own Orthodox church and to this day people make amazing Easter eggs. They're using real chicken eggs. And then starting in 1885, the Romanovs, the ruling family of Russia decided to make the most decadent possible version of that art style. Yeah, because it's not, they're not using eggs, right? They're using, it is like precious metals, precious stones, etc. Yeah, I had to check. I wouldn't have known. There is not any biological egg inside a Fabergé egg. There's no like you start from an egg shell or anything. No, they're also usually, I mean, I guess some of them are just egg-sized and some of them are big. Yeah, like ostrich egg-sized.

Yeah. And in 1885, the Romanovs placed a standing order with a jeweler named Peter Carl Gustavovich Fabergé, who was Russian in St. Petersburg. His French Huguenot ancestors fled Catholic persecution. We keep mentioning the Huguenots. This is like the- They've come up a lot lately. It's come up a lot lately.

A ton. Like- Farriman, Fabergé, yeah. The Huguenots were not on my radar, honestly. Alex before this show, and now it's like every week we're talking about the gosh darn Huguenots. They're a Hugue deal. Yeah, I mean, you can't.

That was such a Youth Faster joke. I apologize. Oh boy, oh boy. Everyone leave. No, let that soak in. Let that marinate. Let that sink in. I've never been a Youth Faster.

I could just see it. So Fabergé is in St. Petersburg and for more than 30 years, from 1885 until the Russian Revolution, the Tsars are paying him enormous sums and giving him their extra gems to make enormous lavish jeweled eggs that they usually just give each other. The first one in 1885, Tsar Alexander III gives it to his wife as an Easter gift. He was a real wife guy. A real Sarina guy. A real Sarina guy. Alexander III's successor is Tsar Nicholas II.

He says, one Easter Fabergé egg is not enough. We need two per year, even though there's only one Easter per year. And so they produce a set of 50-jeweled eggs right up until the Russian Revolution happens and the Bolsheviks kill or eject them from Russia. Yeah. For a reference, some of their very ill-fated wars, I think with Sweden, caused a good amount of food shortage, which people were not happy about. And it made them a little hangry. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, like the history of the Russian Tsars, especially toward the

end there, is very grim. A few decades before they start ordering eggs, Tsar Alexander II begins to reform serfdom, which was borderline slavery and lasted for more than 200 years. It really was a very oppressive and unequal system. And then they're buying themselves ridiculous eggs. It's gross to me. I don't like it. The last, like the Tsar Nicholas, the one where that whole family was killed, like he was not paying, like his advisors were like, get out of the country, dude. Like you and your family are in huge danger.

And he's like, no, no, I'm sure it is fine. Do you have any more of those very pretty eggs? Maybe Funko Pops made out of precious jewels? Exactly. He was not taking things seriously. He was like, maybe a third egg this year, I don't know. And they're like, you are in such trouble. Yeah, it was not like the Anastasia movie.

Remember that one? The... Yes, yeah, it's been really glamorized, but it was a tough time. The Bluth version of Anastasia, Don Bluth. But it was not a magical evil Rasputin turning the peasants against their benevolent rulers. Exactly. It was a bad time.

The other thing with these eggs, which again are Easter eggs, they're bizarre art object Easter eggs. They are bizarre art object Easter eggs. They have also become kind of a treasure hunt because once the revolution happens, the Bolsheviks just kind of sell a lot of the eggs and other eggs get smuggled away. According to the UK Royal Collection Trust, eight of the 50 eggs are still not accounted for. They're just like priceless art objects we can't find. Some duck is sitting on them going like, why won't they hatch? Yeah. And also apparently in the year 2010, in 2010, an antiques dealer in the US, at

a sale in the US, bought what he thought was just a decorative egg statue. It turned out to be an Imperial Faberge Easter egg valued at $33 million. A lot of the romance of these is that kind of thing that we do with Anastasia and other Romanov stuff. It's a lost royal treasure hunt kind of thing. Right, right, right. But they're just like weird Easter eggs of an oppressive regime. It's so strange.

Yeah, I mean there's also, we love a good treasure hunt. I mean that's, I think there's so much mythos about the whole thing of like, ooh, the lost princess, ooh, this whole family killed. So like people like a spooky pretty egg. They do and they're gorgeous. There's pictures like, they are very cool art. They are very pretty. The guy did a good job.

But yeah, but they're Easter eggs the whole time. It's not just that the czars thought eggs are a fun art shape. It was tied into Orthodox Christianity and Easter and all that. Yeah, no, that makes sense. They could have maybe just gotten a kinder surprise and then maybe the serfs would be less angry. Look a toy as the palace burns and there's torches. It has little men inside that you can play with. And jumping to a whole different topic, the last takeaway of the main show, takeaway number

three, the U.S. almost sparked a century long tradition of Easter egg trees in parallel to Christmas trees. So this is interesting because I remember my mom would put up a little paper mache tree and there would be tiny little eggs like they were made out of wood I think so they were mini like hummingbird egg size but it was like a little like white paper mache tree and then she hung little like Easter eggs on it and she'd put it on our table. So I don't know if that was a thing. I didn't realize, I thought it was just something

my mom did. And cause your family did a Christmas tree too, right? My dad's side of the family that's Jewish, but my dad was super into, he was never really religious and he really liked the, he liked Christmas and he really liked Easter. He got, I think it was just so fun and novel for him. So we kind of like, since he was so,

it was like my dad bringing the heat for Easter and Christmas. But we would also do Hanukkah and Passover. But yeah, just like eggs in the house, absolutely. Or eggs in our yard, yeah, sounds great. That's cool, and it really fits this. And it could be either American stuff or Ukrainian American stuff. Because from like the mid 1800s all the way till the mid 1900s, some Americans put up a bare branch tree, not an evergreen tree,

but decorated with Easter eggs for Easter. It was almost a second home tree tradition. Like a full size tree? Because ours was like little, but it sounds like ours was almost a second home tree tradition. Like a full-sized tree? Because ours was like little, but it sounds like ours was just a little version of this full-sized tree. Yeah, they'd go big, like Christmas tree size. Yeah. Wow. The key sources are A Piece for Atlas Obscuria by Annie Eubank, a show from the public radio

show The World from PRI, and A Piece for vox.com by Tara Isabella Burton. It turns out the influences that led to Christmas trees also led to an Easter tree idea. And as early as the mid 1800s, some Americans started hollowing out decorated chicken eggs so they last hanging them on a tree for Easter. There was also like a old Protestant roots to this, sort of like the Protestant route in Germany that started Christmas trees. A few towns in Europe that were Protestant did an Easter egg tree as well. Atlas Obscura has pictures of people in the central German town of Saalfeld, where one

local couple's done a giant Easter egg tree every year since the 1960s. In 2012, they hung 10,000 hand-painted eggs on a tree for Easter. Wow. He's also like, I'm looking at the picture you sent me. It looks like a lot of them are also decorated with like beads and lace and confetti pieces. So it's very cool looking. Yeah. And around the turn of the century, the US really bumped this up. Germany never and confetti pieces. So it's very cool looking. Yeah, and around the turn of the century, the US really bumped this up. Germany never spread it like they spread Christmas trees, but in the spring of 1895, Lewis C. Tiffany,

the Tiffany jeweler, the store owner, he held a- The lamp guy. Yeah, the lamp guy, yeah. And he held a benefit for a local hospital in 1895. The central attraction was a Easter egg tree. This led many other rich New Yorkers to do it. Apparently also separately some working class families in Appalachia would do it, partly because they hoped the eggs would be a good luck charm for fertility and having a bigger family. In 1950, a children's

author in the US named Katherine Milhouse wrote a best-selling children's book called The Egg Tree about Easter egg trees. She hand-painted 600 Easter eggs for an egg tree at the Maine New York Public Library. Like there have been a lot of people and trends trying to push this in the US. Yeah, I didn't realize there was like a whole egg tree movement, but I do think, I think we got to bring it back. We got to bring back egg trees, guys. That's what's wrong with our country.

It is like basically a divergence, especially as Christmas commercialized more where just Christmas and Easter went different directions in the United States. And they both had the potential to be like Christmases today. And we just picked one. I like more holidays. And I feel like as many as possible, please, with as many weird traditions as possible. Like the May poll, why don't we do that anymore? We got to have more stuff that we do. And I'm pretty much dead serious because

I think it's good for a community to have stuff and holidays. I don't like the idea of like we dump all of it onto Christmas and then we're just like, eh, you know. The last last idea about Easter eggs is basically just a cultural idea that in the US they represent how little focus we put on Easter. Beyond Easter eggs and an Easter bunny guy, we don't do a whole lot, even though it's one of the two pillars of the whole Christian year. One amazing US thing is that unlike Canada, unlike the parts of the UK, we don't make Good Friday or Easter Monday a holiday for banks

or the government or anything. It's partly because it moves on the calendar, but it's also partly because we've really kind of kept church and state separate with Easter. We don't stop the year for it. We don't do holidays for it. Eggs are one of the only things we bother with. Yeah. I mean, I'm very secular, but I also like time off. So in... Most people do. It's really surprising that you don't get Good Friday off in the United States like officially. Right. In the U.S. we kind of treat Easter like it's Valentine's Day or St. Patrick's Day. Right, just kind of a minor thing. Just two random Saint's Days we built up. Yeah. They're not Easter.

If you're a Christian, Easter is so much bigger than those. Right. There's a Saint's day every day. It's not that big. Yeah. To be fair, Passover is in spring, and that is much more of a big deal than Hanukkah in Judaism. So Hanukkah happens around Christmas,

but it's been kind of built up into a bigger deal than it usually was because of its proximity to Christmas and Passover is just a much bigger deal and that's in the spring. But like, I just think in general, we need more frolicking time. So we need more holidays regardless of the denomination and make a big deal, like make a big stink out of holidays more

Yeah, let that Biological Easter eggs stay out there get a little sink going, you know, that's what we mean Get a little stink on that thing. Yeah Folks, that is the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaways. Mega Takeaway number one, eggs are both a Christian symbol of Easter and a global symbol of creation. Takeaway number two, the final Russian Tsars wasted a lot of their final money on Easter eggs.

Takeaway number three, the US almost sparked a tradition of Easter egg trees in parallel to Christmas trees. And then so many numbers about the arguable largest Easter egg hunt ever held, the origins of a lot of dyes and decorative traditions, and two weird ways the US is terrified of Easter egg candy. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where

we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the astoundingly bizarre system for determining the date of Easter and one Easter that gets celebrated with dynamite. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show. For a library of almost 20 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of Max Fun bonus shows It's special audio. It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation Additional fun things check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org

Key sources this week include a lot of scholarship on the folklore of Easter and Easter eggs. In particular, Brett Landau, a lecturer in religious studies at the University of Texas, Austin, Toc Thompson, professor of anthropology and folklore at the University of Southern California, a loose use of Alan Watts, the popular philosopher, and his book, Easter, Its Story and Meaning. Also, lots of museum digital resources from the Smithsonian, from the Bowers Museum in Orange County, California, from the UK Royal Collection Trust, and then tons more digital writing from trustworthy sources like The Guardian,

The Daily Dot, Smithsonian Folklore Magazine, and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadegok people, and others. Also KD taped this in the country of Italy. And I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here.

That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIFT Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 16 that is about the topic of The Great Gatsby, the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fun fact there, there is a ton of advertising for Gatsby themed products and events and parties that has nothing to do with the themes or message of the book.

So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my cohost Katie Goldin's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken, Un-Shavin' by the BUDDHOS band. By the way, the BUDDHOS band has a new album next month. Check out the BUDDHOS band's website, thebudUDOS band has a new album next month. Check out the BUDOS band's website, thebudos.com to see tour dates and also hear the first few tracks from that new album. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping

support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating So how about that? Talk to you then The end.