Yes, says

Laura Sophia Jung

Laura Sophia Jung

Source: Laura Sophia Jung

display

When I was five years old, the Easter Bunny gave me a rabbit.

None made of chocolate, but one with fur.

I called him shell.

After a few months at the latest, I knew that it was not the Easter bunny but my parents who had given me the bunny.

My big brothers told me.

I didn't care.

A rabbit is a rabbit, and for a five-year-old maybe the best of all.

One day the mussel was gone.

The stable door was open, some hay was on the floor.

No trace of a mussel.

I was very sad.

Back then, my mom told me that Muschel had escaped and started a family on the nearest mountain.

display

This building of lies only collapsed last year.

Shell had been torn from the marten.

My mother said this to me casually over lunch - luckily a vegetarian one.

I wanted to be angry.

After all, she had lied to me.

But when she told me how she found the tattered rabbit's body in the courtyard early in the morning, disposed of it clandestinely and washed away the blood with a bucket of water, I understood her.

It was a good lie.

She had made the difficult parting with my rabbit a little easier.

The Easter Bunny, on the other hand, is a bad lie.

And not only because siblings can hurt you with the sentence "There is no Easter bunny" when you show them a great gift.

I've seen many children looking for Easter gifts: They don't care who's hiding the gift, as long as it's the Lego Ninjago set they wanted.

This is how children learn to say thank you for gifts

display

Educationally, it is also better to tell children that the rabbit laying eggs and hiding presents is nonsense.

Firstly, because otherwise you have to laboriously teach them at school that rabbits don't lay eggs.

Second, because you can teach them to say thank you for gifts straight away.

And last but not least, Easter is simply better without the Easter Bunny: Children can then not only look for eggs, but also hide them.

It's relaxing for parents and the best thing ever for kids (maybe even better than a bunny).

It is important to tell children that there is no Easter Bunny.

And if you don't have the heart to do that, at least don't pretend that he exists.

Lies should be saved for the really important moments.

display

By the way, I got a rabbit for my 18th birthday: pancakes.

I was as happy as a five year old.

Friends had "freed" it from a hardware store for me - a euphemism for stealing it bordering on a lie.

When I moved into a rabbit-friendly apartment to study, my mother and I brought pancakes to an animal enclosure in the Black Forest.

I visited her there two years later.

She started a family.

The author still thinks that rabbits are the best of all - that is, everyone except the Easter bunny.

No, thinks

Lucas Wiegelmann

Lucas Wiegelmann

Source: Claudius Pflug

It's hard to say who's the more annoying, the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, but it's probably the Easter Bunny.

Santa Claus has at least one Christian ancestor, St. Nicholas.

The ancestor of the Easter bunny is (presumably) just some rabbit, a pagan fertility symbol.

The fact that he, the mammal, only appears by bringing the Easter eggs does not make his story any more conclusive.

There is not even an educational incentive concept associated with it.

He has no servant Ruprecht at his side who could openly address deficits from the past to naughty children.

The resurrection of Christ may be unbelievable for many people, but that such a nonsensical figure as the Easter Bunny could become a symbol of the holiday is the real Easter miracle.

Only: That is not decisive here.

If you were to remove everything that is annoying or implausible from the children's room, not much would be left there.

That is what distinguishes children's imaginations in such an enviable way from ours: They can also simply accept the contradictory and illogical, the wonderful and the fantastic.

You can still marvel with doubt and skepticism at what we are condemned to smile at in false arrogance - the Easter Bunny, for example.

Your world is still magical.

Ours is coherent, consistent and correspondingly boring.

display

But you shouldn't lie to your own children, some argue.

That destroys the relationship of trust with the parents.

Well, according to the logic, one would have to point out to all three-year-olds after every bedtime story that “Peppa Pig”, “Snow White” and the “Gruffalo” do not exist, because most of them will assume that too.

Of course nobody does that.

What is the point of dragging the children out of their realm of imagination prematurely?

Sooner or later they have to leave it anyway.

As for the Easter Bunny: sooner.

Most five-year-olds no longer believe that the egg liqueur chicks were actually put between the crocuses by a rabbit - there are too many rumors to the contrary in the kindergarten for that.

When the flowerbed turns into a magic garden

If you subtract the first year of life in which they are still too young, the child does not even have a handful of seasons to experience their own flower beds as a magic garden, in which a mysterious and apparently good-natured being has hidden beautiful things.

To sterilize these irretrievable moments for you with rational explanations (“The chocolate bunny under the rhododendron was on sale at Aldi yesterday”) may be coherent and consistent.

But also terribly boring - and a little bit heartless.

Lucas Wiegelmann has been the family's Easter egg hunter for two years, but nobody is allowed to know.