Santa who?

As soon as november rolls around, Christmas decorations are up in stores and malls - a friendly reminder to the world that the holidays are not far away, time to start buying. By the time that December comes, Santa Claus is visiting stores and children are happily sitting on his lap - a Christmas tradition. This year, people will be reminided that spring is coming with the appearance of the Easter Bunny in many stores. According to a Chicago Tribune Article, the "Easter Bunny is slowly and skillfully creating a comfortable throne for himself in America's shopping mall atriums". Becoming sort of an icon for spring, the bunny is used to attract customers, especially when Easter candy sales and clothing sales are down, as they are this year. To me, it seems like the Easter bunny has gone from being a part of an important religious holiday to a more universally accepted marketing ploy/icon. But this is not necessarily a bad thing, I guess. According to the article I read, Respect the rabbit: Easter Bunny creeping up on Santa’s mall turf, cultural anthropologist Pamela Frese thinks that "the Easter Bunny's popularity demonstrates how Americans have increasingly turned to malls as community centers, where people of all religious backgrounds can celebrate so-called civil-religious holidays together". So the Easter bunny, while getting people to spend more money and feel happy about spring, is unifying for communities. What do you think?

Another thing that I found that was interesting from the article was that it described the ways in which the Easter Bunny's look has changed throughout the years. During the Great Depression, the Easter bunny was illustrated as a factory worker, and during the Civil Rights era, the Bunny had brown fur. Given the struggles that our nation is facing today, what should the Easter bunny wear, or be physically depicted as?

Picture from:http://www.costumzee.com/view/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/easter-bunny.gif