While Easter has become a day for egg hunts and bunnies, the first colonists celebrated a little differently.
“It’s kind of tricky to determine, there’s not a lot of information,” said Nancy Egloff, a historian with the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. “It depends on what was happening back in England, and it was such an in between period.”
Egloff said prior to the 1640s, a lot of pagan traditions were practiced to celebrate the day in the early years of Jamestown. But there was a gradual shift coming out of the 15th century when the Puritan religion was starting to take control in England. Egloff said this meant the celebrations and feasts were generally not practiced because there was a heavy focus on worship.
“They had fallen away from a lot of merry-making kind of events,” Egloff said. “They didn’t want anything to do with partying and dancing. But that doesn’t mean people didn’t do it. Even when things were banned, there were still churches that still continued old customs.”
Egloff said there is a good possibility that Rev. Richard Bucke, the minister at the Jamestown Colony in the early 15th century, would have had Easter service and had some sort of meal or celebration afterward.
But even if the harvest had been decent that year, the Easter holiday generally fell during a season when not much was growing. So even if the colonists decided to have a feast, it would be with a lot of preserved vegetables, maybe a bit of fish and some pastries.
In the 1640s those feasts became illegal in England even though Easter was still observed. Whereas Christmastime is a season of month-long celebration, Easter was seen as a purely holy day. During Christmas, people were able to take off from work, have parties and celebrate with singing and dancing.
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But Easter became a day to focus on church and worship.
“Catholicism had a lot of rituals but when the church in England formed, some of those rituals were taken away,” she said.
While that was during a time of religious transition for England and many rural parts of the country still might have celebrated with older pagan traditions, a lot of the colonists were coming directly from London.
“If something is coming from parliament you’ll see it in London before the rural areas,” she said.
One of the other reasons there might be less celebration during that time is because there were other holidays around Easter that were celebrated more heavily, such as May Day, which is a secular holiday.
Egloff added there weren’t any laws in Virginia indicating a particular holiday at that time, except for one in 1622 that made March 22 a solemn day to remember those killed during the Anglo-Powhatan War.
“There’s probably not a whole lot going on,” Egloff said. “Even though it’s a really important day to Christians, it wasn’t a big holiday time to the English.”
