Scary bunny, stay away

We're just gonna go ahead and put this out there: something about the Easter Bunny is...a little off.

More so in the picture to the right, but still...it's a bunny that stalks your children and brings them eggs in the middle of the night. In our book that equals creepy and also doesn't tie to the Easter celebration of recognizing Christ's resurrection.

Or so we thought...we set out to find the origin of the Easter Bunny and it's amazing what you can find on the Internet.

According to a number of websites, including Wikipedia - or "The Wikster" as we call it - the Easter Bunny first came to America with German settlers in the 1700s.

Some of them were Protestants and wanted to retain the Catholic custom of eating colored eggs for Easter, but were torn because they didn't want to force their kids to fast for Lent.

They waited until Lent was over, then decorated and hid the extra stock-pile of eggs that had collected over 40 days and nights. Once the kids found the eggs, they considered them a treat left by the Easter Bunny.

The bunny - a symbol of Springtime fertility - somehow got thrown into the mix, which is where we get confused. But, then again, not EVERYTHING in the both the Catholic and Protestant churches makes perfect sense, so we'll let it go before they sic a Jesuit and a Baptist on us.

The tradition of hiding eggs went on until the Easter Children's Rebellion of 1863 when the German-American tykes demanded that the eggs be made out of chocolate or they would turn all live chickens into marshmallow creatures before they could utter a peep. The Coalition of Adults assumed this was a bluff, and that's how Peeps came to be.

With all their livestock now turned into marshmallows, the adults scrambled to appease the children, so they made chocolate eggs and bunnies and presented them as peace offerings in the form of ornate baskets...hence the Easter Basket was born.

Don't believe us? The Internet doesn't lie folks. Happy Easter!