Full of Easter promise
3 April 2012
We can’t resist chocolate eggs so we started Easter early at the Pad offices. We never stop thinking about design so while we were unwrapping that sparkly foil to reveal the velvety chocolate, we were thinking about the design of Easter eggs (well, that’s our excuse, anyway).
Eggs have been associated with spring for thousands of years. Zoroastrians painted eggs to celebrate their New Year, and Ukrainians used beeswax to create elaborately decorated eggs called pysanky. Pysanky were thought to protect households from evil spirits, catastrophe, lightning and fire. Here’s a weird fact – the world’s largest pysanka is in Vegreville, Alberta. It was built in 1974 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
There’s a record of decorated Easter eggs in Edward I’s household accounts, way back in 1307 – 450 eggs were to be boiled and dyed or covered with gold leaf and distributed to the Royal household.
Fast-forward to 1842 when John Cadbury made his first ‘French eating chocolate, but it took another 30 years before he could invent a method for moulding the chocolate into an egg shape.
By now, eggs were all the rage across Europe and it was round about the same time that Fabergé produced its first jewelled egg. It was a gift from Tsar Alexander to his wife, Empress Marie, and featured a small gold egg in an outside shell of platinum and enamel.
And here’s another obscure egg fact – in the 1983 James Bond movie Octopussy, Bond, played by Roger Moore, outbids Kamal Khan for a Fabergé egg and at the auction he replaces the real egg with a fake containing a recording device.
Happy Easter, everyone!