Got to the checkout of my local Coop today and the Easter rabbits were already out in force. Switzerland prefers Easter rabbits to Easter eggs; don’t ask me why. It is all the more mysterious that the rabbits are made by Lindt, the Swiss chocolate maker, half the time yet Switzerland doesn’t actually have any wild rabbits. It’s a Swiss mystery. The rabbits could hop over from France, but they don’t. Maybe they aren’t Easter rabbits at all, but Easter hares. You can occasionally see hares in Switzerland.
It is about -10°C today with a wicked east wind. We are also in mid February and there is plenty of winter to get through yet. We could be in for some more snow soon; in fact you’d have to think that bearing in mind the time of year and the Arctic temperatures, it would be highly unlikely for there not to be some more snow this winter – perhaps even lots of it. I welcome this, as I like a proper cold winter in which you can do wintry things like huddling around log fires (I almost said “roaring” log fires but sidestepped the worst of the cliché at the last moment), skiing and drinking mulled wine.
So what’s with the early Easter bunny arrival? Easter is on April 8th, in other words two months away. It begs all sorts of questions.
The first of these is, why are we always accelerating into the future instead of just enjoying the present? Why do we have to be fixated on spring, when we are very much in the depths of winter? It just seems redolent of constant unhappiness, a lack of satisfaction with the status quo, no matter what it is. There you are, enjoying your summer holiday and still having barbecues out in the garden when the shops get filled up with ghouls and pumpkins to prepare you for Halloween. You’ve barely digested your pumpkin and are still poking around in the forest looking for mushrooms when you are almost submerged by Christmas decorations and aggressed by perfume adverts. The tree is scarcely down when it’s all Easter rabbits.
This suggests a total lack of imagination on the part of retailers, if they can only orient their wares around pseudo religious festivals. But wait a moment. Retailers only ever do anything to make more money, so if there are lots of Easter rabbit displays two months early, then people must be buying them. You can understand that people might be persuaded to do their Christmas shopping early, not that I’ve ever met anyone who was, but surely people don’t buy their Easter eggs – or bunnies – two months in advance? Chocolate is still reasonably perishable; it’s not going to get any better in two months and it might melt. You suspect then, that the bunnies are for immediate consumption and that by beginning early, the retailers will sell lots of them in the run-up to Easter and then another heap for Easter itself. It’s the only scenario that makes any sense.
So who are the consumers of Easter bunnies, when you have entire isles groaning (another good cliché that) with bars of chocolate? There is no shortage of chocolate in this country, unsurprisingly. I can’t say that I have noticed that the chocolate in an Easter bunny tastes especially different from chocolate you can find in a chocolate bar. So you then have to think that the simple fact of pouring the chocolate into a bunny mould and covering it in gold foil does wonders for sales. It must do. Maybe this is why the Swiss don’t do Easter eggs. Perhaps the egg just doesn’t have the non-seasonal appeal of the rabbit. I find this a little strange. It always seems a bit sadistic to attack your Easter bunny, whereas who cares about an Easter egg? It’s not as if a chick was going to hatch out if it anyway.
Old joke but I still think it's hilarious.
