I find the connection slightly disconcerting: “Jesus is the Lamb of God, so have another slice with mint sauce!”. That’s taking the concept behind the Eucharist a little far.
I thought the connection was pre-Christian and came from lamb or goat sacrifices associated with Pesach. Hence the lamb bone at a seder.
The point is that it never was, no matter how much sense it might appear to make. The cultural phenomenon of there being a known special meal on a particular day - like Christmas dinner - never extended to Easter. Even if a lot of people happened to eat roast lamb, doing so for Easter wasn’t a thing.
There was no history of an Easter roast, any more than there was a Valentine’s Day hamburger. Then suddenly, supermarkets were advertising things as being perfect for the Easter roast, as though it had always been there.
Depends on your culture, I guess. We definitely grew up with very traditional Easter meal foods (my folks are both from Poland.) There certainly was an Easter meal. Lamb or ham were the typical roasts, but there’s a whole mess of other food traditions (horseradish, sausages, zurek [a type ofs our soup], etc.)
But even just looking through Google books, I see references back to the 19th century here in America and Britain of an Easter dinner. Take this passage from “Out West” (1895):
I grew up in a very Catholic area, and Easter dinners were absolutely events with some food expeectations, no matter what your ethnic background.
Bluegrass music is of much newer origin than most people think.
Greek too. And now I want souvlaki.
Fair enough, actually. It appeared to spring from nowhere in the UK relatively recently - had it been traditional here it had fizzled out sufficiently that it really wasn’t a big thing. Easter was certainly very commercial, but that was largely chococentric.
I have, many times, all with people who hailed from Massachusetts, New York, or New Jersey. I’m guessing it’s an east coast kind of thing.
Even in the U.S. Halloween didn’t become popular until the '60’s.
Is Krampus an actual Victorian legend? If it is it seems kind of strange that I didn’t hear about it until around 2000.
Touring casinos…
I’ve lived in all three states, and I’ve never encountered this tradition before reading about it on this Board. I still don’t actually know of anyone who does it.
It might be an age thing as well- my cousin, who also lives in NY listens to it every Thanksgiving. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the song in my life - but she’s also 10-12 years older than me. She was 14-16 when the song came out- I was 4.
I’m with you on this. I guess we maybe had a sit down roast with the family at easter (it was Sunday, after all), but I don’t have any food associations with it. Well, aside from Simnel cake, which my mother is still waging a one woman war to keep it an easter tradition.
I hereby approve of this as a valid entry to the thread, however, that was more true when the genre first came about than today. In the 40s it sounded like it was 70 years old when it was really new. Today it sounds like it is 140 years old when it is really 70, which isn’t as big of a difference.
My wife adores Simnel cake, and her birthday is in mid-April so it’s generally what I bake her for that. So it is a tradition for us now, but only because of a very specific set of circumstances.
Diamonds as traditional engagement ring ornaments was a concept invented by De Beers in the 1940s. All the associated bull about ‘2 months salary’ etc also followed.
One of history’s greatest ever advertising campaigns.
I have never liked diamonds, and neither has my wife (or my mother, my most obvious frame of reference), so it never occurred to me to bother thinking about it (other than out of frustration when trying to find sapphires set without diamonds for said wife, when she was still prospective fiancée)…but that does not surprise me one tiny bit.
Actually, DeBeers revived a tradition that had been popular since the 1890s but had waned because of the Depression.
???
My brother and I were out collecting for UNICEF in the 50s, so Halloween was already being employed for that purpose by then. And my parents had pictures of their own Halloween costumes from the 30s. They did admit that it shifted to being more about the kids over the years (as opposed to adults going to parties in costume), but we lived in a fairly suburban area of CT in the mid-50s and there were kids trick-or-treating all over the place.
In 1957, I was an elf. In 1958, I was a robot. In 1959, I was Robin Hood.
I just checked. The Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF program began in 1950.