Dotcomgiftshop Easter Blog
Reluctant Easter bunnies
Come on, admit it you big softy. You know you just love seeing cute babies and animals dressed up as bunny rabbits at Easter.
Well, you've come to the right place. At DotComGiftShop, we don't just sell Easter gifts (although we do have a fantastic selection) we also try to cater to all your festive needs.
So here are a selection of adorable babies and pets, who admittedly don't look entirely pleased to be dressed up.
50 facts about chocolate for Easter
Easter has become dominated by chocolate. Every year, millions of chocolate eggs are handed out on Easter Sunday, making more than a few children feel significantly unwell by the end of the day.
At DotComGiftShop, we think it's a great idea to consider giving alternative Easter presents but concede that chocolate is a mainstay of the celebration.
So, to show we're not spoilsports, here are 50 fascinating facts about chocolate.
1. Nineteen-year-old Milton Hershey founded the Hershey Chocolate Company in 1871.
2. Milton Hershey was commissioned by the U.S. Government to make a candy bar to be included in the soldier’s rations during World War II.
3. In the Alfred Hitchcock movie “Psycho”, chocolate syrup was used as blood in the movie’s famous shower scene.
4. Chocolate does grow on trees.
5. Chocolate gets its start from the tropical tree, Theobroma cacao, or the cacao tree.
6. The Mayans used cacao beans as a form of currency. A rabbit or a prostitute could be bought for 10 beans while a slave could be bought for 100 beans.
7. The Spaniards considered chocolate a healthy food.
8. Chocolate is not a contributing factor of acne.
9. For nearly all of its history, chocolate has been consumed as an expensive drink.
10. At one time, the Catholic Church decided that it was a sin to drink chocolate during lent.
11. Chocolate was considered an upper class drink because it was fashionable and expensive.
12. Since the 18th century, people have believed that chocolate is an aphrodisiac.
13. The myth that chocolate causes hyperactivity in children is not true.
14. Chocolate contains Theobromine, an ingredient which can be toxic to dogs.
15. Chocolate is substantially lower in caffeine than coffee or tea.
16. Chocolate initiates the release of endorphins, which act as a natural antidepressant.
17. There are around 40 to 45 cocoa beans contained in one cocoa pod.
18. History says that Napoleon always ate chocolate when he needed energy.
19. Chocolate has anti-oxidants which may reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease.
20. Chocolate contains minerals that the body needs such as iron and magnesium.
21. Refrigerating chocolate does not impair its flavor.
22. Heat, air, and age can impair the flavor of chocolate.
23. The word cocoa came as a result of the misspelling of the word cacao.
24. Different varieties of cocoa beans have different flavors.
25. Chocolate contains chromium, which helps to control blood sugar.
26. Chocolate is not responsible for causing headaches.
27. Henri Nestle was the first to make Milk Chocolate.
28. Famous movie about chocolate is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
29. The Spaniards prescribed chocolate as a medicine to reduce fever and pain.
30. Consumers spend more than $7 billion a year on chocolate.
31. Chocolate should be stored in a cool place.
32. When women crave food, they crave chocolate.
33. The Cadbury Chocolate Company created the first chocolate bar in 1824.
34. The Tootsie Roll was named after inventor Leonard Hershfield’s daughter.
35. Chocolate was introduced to the U.S. in 1765.
36. The only U.S. state to grow cacao beans is Hawaii.
37. Chocolate can be fatal to parrots.
38. A chocolate bar is low in cholesterol.
39. People cannot be addicted to chocolate.
40. The word chocolate is derived from the Aztec word “xocolatl”, which means “bitter water.”
41. Christopher Columbus introduced Europe to chocolate.
42. Switzerland is one of the leading countries in eating chocolate.
43. Chocolate melts in your mouth because the melting point of cocoa butter is just below 98.6 degrees F.
44. The largest box of chocolate was made by Marshall Field’s of Chicago.
45. The most popular chocolate in the UK is Cadbury.
46. The Madeleine is the most expensive chocolate in the world.
47. Nestle manufactured the first white chocolate in the 1930s.
48. Chocolate is the most popular treat given out on Halloween.
49. February is Chocolate Lover’s Month in the U.S.
50. Older children are more likely to prefer chocolate than younger children.
How to Make an Easter Basket
DotComGiftShop have a wonderful range of Easter baskets.
But if you need a lot of baskets at short notice or just don't have the money to splash around, fear not.
We're here to help!
Here's a great little tutorial on how you can make your own Easter baskets, which are incredibly simple to contruct, but strong enough to hold all your Easter treats.
This is also a great activity to do with the kids on their Easter holidays if you're looking for something to fill their time with.
Enjoy!
What you need:
- Thin card - A3 Recommened (the bigger the card the bigger the basket)
- Ruler
- Pencil
- Scissors
- Paper fasteners
Instructions
The size of your Easter basket depends on the size of the base. When you have decided on the size of the base;
1. Draw a tic-tac-toe (or noughts and crosses) grid on your paper with each square the same size as the base; or in other words, nine equal squares. You can label each square on the top 1, 2 and 3 and on the bottom three squares 4, 5 and 6.
2. Cut out a handle that is at least longer than three consecutive squares. For example, if your squares are 4 inches each, your handle should be at least 16 inches long. The handle should be pierced about a half an inch from each end.
3. Cut the lines the length of one square up to the middle square between 1 and 2 and 2 and 3. Also cut the lines between 4 and 5 and 5 and 6.
4. Put a dot in the middle about a half an inch from the edge of squares 2 and 5. This is where the brass paper fasteners will go through all four layers.
5. Squares 1 and 3 will fold over square 2 and squares 4 and 6 will fold over square 5. In other words, you can fold the side squares over the middle one and decide how wide you want your basket to be.
6. Mark the spot where the dot in the middle square overlaps the other two squares. This is where you will need to pierce a hole in all three sections. This part may be difficult for young children and the adults who are helping can do the piercing.
7. Add the handle and put the brass paper fastener through all four holes at each end.
8. Your basket is ready for decoration. For Easter, lots of spring flowers and some chicks and ducklings may look good. Ribbons tied around the handles with long streamers are festive too.
Easter Records
The World's Biggest Easter Egg
Chocolate Easter eggs come in all shapes and sizes. Well, actually, they’re all basically the same shape. But they do come in lots of different sizes, from the very small to the very big.
But none come bigger than this baby.
Made from around 50,000 chocolate bars (that’s 1950kg of chocolate) by Guylian in St Niklaas, Belgium, in 2005, the egg measured 8.32 metres high and took 26 craftsman 525 hours to build. It’s not know if any of the aforementioned craftsmen were Oompa Loompas but we wouldn’t rule it out.
The World's Biggest Ever Easter Egg Hunt
That’s one egg that wouldn’t be difficult to find on an Easter egg hunt. And speaking of Easter egg hunts, the biggest ever was held in 2007 at Cypress Gardens, a theme park near Winter Haven, Florida in the US.
It was attended by 9,700 people searching for 510,000 candy-filled eggs, 1,000 of them containing special prizes donated by local businesses. Incredibly, the eggs were collected in less than hour! Good work!
The World's Most Expensive Easter Egg
But if quality, not quantity, is more to your liking, how about the chocolate Easter egg with the biggest price tag? How does a cool £50,000 sound?
That was how much the Diamond Stella Egg went on sale for at the La Maison du Chocolat store in Piccadilly, London, in April 2006. Made in Paris over a three-week period, the egg was encrusted with more than one hundred 0.5 carat diamonds and was 65cm tall.
Somewhat disappointingly, though, it only contained peach and apricot chocolates and pralines. What a rip-off!
The World's Biggest Box of Chocolates
But for an Easter gift that really keeps on giving, you could do a lot worse than the world’s biggest box of chocolates, which was displayed in Leicester Square, London, in 2008.
Made by Thorntons, it stood at 16.5ft tall and 11.5ft wide, weighed 2,000kg and contained 175,000 individually wrapped chocolates. That would be quite a sugar rush.
The World's Biggest Bunny Rabbit
Let’s hope the Easter Bunny is big enough for the job of delivering all these giant chocolate treats. But does he measure up to the world’s largest recorded rabbit, the appropriately named Fat Ralph, a Continental Giant rabbit from East Sussex, England.
Still growing at 20kg, he weighs more than an average three-year-old child and eats £10 worth of food a day. We’re assuming his diet doesn’t include chocolate but at that size, who knows?
If you're thinking of a world record attempt why not try the world's biggest Easter party? DotComGiftShop have the world's most stylish Easter decorations to help you get your face in the record books.
How to draw the Easter Bunny
April showers bring May flowers and sends the Easter bunny hopping to make his deliveries.
If you're making your own Easter decorations or just want a fun activity to keep the kids occupied for a few minutes, why not teach them how to draw the Easter Bunny?
Here's a step-by-step for a simple drawing:
1. Take a white piece of A4 paper and draw a circle the size of your palm in the middle. This is the Easter bunny's head. Leave room above his head and on the sides for his long bunny ears.
2. Inside the circle, place your pencil a little below the top edge. Then, draw 2 thumb size ovals, one towards the left and another towards the right side.
3. Next, draw a tiny circle in the lower right corner of your thumb size ovals. You can trace around a small button or coin for this circle. Completely fill in these smaller areas with black.
4. To give your Easter bunny a face, start by adding a nose shaped like the letter Y between the two eyes.
5. For a mouth, at the bottom tip of the Y, draw an inch long line that's slightly slanted downward, from the left and again from the right of the Y's tip.
6. You may add a light small curved line under the mouth for a chin. Also, give the bunny a couple of cheeks by drawing small vertical lines on the sides of the face for more detail.
7. Now, draw the bunny ears. Start at the top of the head, and on each side draw an ear in the shape of a small banana with lines that meet at a point. Your bunny will have tall ears that are easier to draw than bent over ears. Between the ears you can add a little tuft of fur on the top of his head.
Got your bunny's ears, face and head done? Great. Let's give him a body.
8. The bunny's body is about twice as big as his head and is shaped like an oval laying on its side. Start at the bottom of the head and draw an oval sideways. For a tail, draw a small circle at the end of the body.
9. If you want feet, from the the bottom edge of the body, draw 2 U shapes that are lined up with the position of the ears. You can use a medium sized coin to help.
10. Add short vertical lines on the bottom of the feet for toes. For back feet, draw them the same way, except on the opposite end.
For a more advanced method of how to draw the Easter Bunny, the video below offers a useful guide:
If you're kids love the Easter bunny, DotComGiftShop have an excellent collection Easter Bunny gifts to choose from.
The History of Easter
Easter… you don’t need us to explain what Easter is, do you? No, thought not. You know it’s a ‘moveable feast’, and you know that phrase has nothing to do with drive-thru or bargain buckets, right? You know all about the Christian tradition of Good Friday, Easter Sunday, the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ.
You probably even know that the date of Easter in the West is determined by first day of the full moon that occurs on or following the spring equinox on 21st March (although you could be forgiven for thinking some blindfolded priest in Rome just sticks a pin somewhere in the ‘March’ and ‘April’ pages of the calendar to decide the date).
Easter actually has pagan and Jewish roots, as well as its obvious Christian association. We know from St Bede, an English historian and scholar from the seventh and eighth centuries, that Easter has partial origins in Teutonic mythology. ‘Eostre’ was the Anglo-Saxon goddess of dawn, who was celebrated at the vernal equinox and to whom the month of April was dedicated.
It’s likely the term ‘Eostre’ had an influence on the Christians who chose the name Easter for their own spring-time festival, hoping to ease the culture shock for any potential pagan converters. But why does Easter fall in the spring?
Well, that’s down to the Jewish festival of Passover. Celebrated during spring in Nisan (the first month of the Hebrew lunar year) to commemorate the Israelites’ deliverance from bondage in Egypt, it was around the time of Passover that Christ was crucified – so Easter is celebrated at the same time of year.
Easter Symbols
The Feast of Easter as recognised by the Christian church was well established by the second century. However, some of the Easter traditions and symbols we recognise today can be traced much further back.
For instance, the association of the egg with spring time was recognised by various cultures in antiquity, including the Egyptians, Persians, Gauls, Greeks and Romans, with the egg symbolising new life.
In medieval times the egg took on a more Christian theme at Easter, representing the Resurrection. Some churches even held egg throwing ceremonies, during which the priest would throw an egg, which would in turn be thrown among the congregation and whoever held the egg when the church bell began to ring would get to keep it – a bit like pass the parcel, only with a bit less of an element of surprise and the potential for more mess.
As for the good old Easter Bunny, the association of rabbits with spring also dates back to antiquity – they were symbols of fertility in ancient Egypt and later Europe. The Easter Bunny as we recognise it today though can be traced back to Germany in the 17th century, with writings referring to an Easter rabbit known as the ‘Osterhase’. Edible likenesses of rabbits have been made at Easter time for around 200 years.
Easter bonnets go back to the days when people would dress down for Lent and then wear their finest clothes at Easter when the self-imposed period of austerity was over.
If you're planning your own celebration over the holiday, DotComGiftShop have an excellent range of Easter decorations to choose from.
