Waking up on a Sunday morning and walking out in your pajamas to do an Easter egg hunt is a memory that many religious and non religious Americans share. Plenty wonder where the tradition of hunting for plastic eggs filled with sweet treats originated from. Even million dollar companies like Home Depot host annual Easter egg hunts for young children to participate in. When did plastic Easter eggs become a common household item?
Assuming most of us are familiar with the history of Easter, the egg is a representation of new life and new beginnings- like the resurrection. This is why eggs are involved with the holiday in the first place, why many families paint and do chalk art on store bought poultry. There is plenty more history on the involvement of eggs in Easter, but when did single-use colorful plastic eggs become the norm?
A father-son inventor duo, Erwin and Donald Weder, from Illinois had a stroke of brilliance when they created the hinged plastic easter egg in 1978. This new connected Easter egg made clean up for families after Easter egg hunts much easier, for they didn't have to search for two separate halves of the egg. Not much else is known about who the real inventor is for the first prototype of plastic easter eggs, and there is much speculation about who the first person was to patent the design.
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I had never once thought about that till you brought it up but its actually extremely interesting. I had never made the connection from resurrection to the new life of eggs and i found it incredibly fascinating
ReplyDeleteHi Katrina,
ReplyDeleteI always wondered why Easter was like this too. I never understood why the holiday was about eggs when it was originally about the resurrection. I never knew that the egg was a symbol of resurrection for many Christians and I wonder when the idea of representing it with eggs originally appeared.