BY CARRIE STETLER

SPECIAL TO NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

Fifty years ago, Easter arrived with hoopla. There were parades and Easter bonnets. Little girls wore Easter dresses  to church,

complete with white gloves, and went home with an Easter lily, the flower pot wrapped in purple foil.

While Americans still celebrate Easter as a rite of spring with colored eggs, baby chicks and bunnies - all remnants of its pagan origins - it isn’t the major holiday it used to be.

But for centuries, Easter was more important than Christmas, according to Tia Kolbaba, an associate professor of Byzantine Studies in the Department of Religion in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers.

It was the first documented Christian holiday, and records of Easter’s observance date back to the second century. “It was part of a developing tradition of great feasts,’’ she says.

As Easter’s religious significance has faded from public consciousness, however, so has some of its fanfare.

“It’s definitely become more secular,” Kolbaba says

Except for the most devout Christians, Americans are only vaguely familiar with the pre-Easter rituals and their symbolism, once so central to the holiday, Kolbaba says.

The spiritual prelude to Easter begins 46 days earlier with Ash Wednesday, when a cross of ashes, drawn on the forehead, represents mortality. It’s the official kick off of Lent, when indulgences and luxuries are renounced until Easter as a show of penitence.

During the week before Easter, observant Christians mark Holy Thursday, when, in many churches, clergy wash the feet of the less fortunate in emulation of Christ during the Last Supper. Then comes Good Friday, when Christ was nailed to the cross and Easter Sunday, which celebrates his resurrection.

In the U.S., there’s little public acknowledgement of pre-Easter traditions, but that’s not the case overseas, especially in countries like Italy and Greece that have a high population of strict Catholics and other observant Christian denominations, says Kolbaba.

“There’s a sense that everyone is observing those holidays,’’ she says. “During Lent, meat is replaced with fish in a lot of stores. There are things that make it clear that this is a time of penitence. In the U.S. it’s not like that at all. You don’t see images of death, sacrifice and crucifixes.”

The Easter celebration has its origins in a pagan holiday named for Eostre, a northern European goddess symbolized by a hare. Although some mistakenly believe the Assyrian and Babylonian Goddess Ishtar was the inspiration for Easter, there is little historical evidence to support the theory, says Kolbaba. "These are usually the claims of fringe, fundamentalist Christian groups who criticize not only Easter but other traditional Christian festivals as corruptions of the gospel and idolatry,'' she says.

In keeping with its pagan roots, Easter is still celebrated on the first full moon after the spring equinox, which is why the date changes annually, making it a “moveable feast’’ says Stuart Charme, a Rutgers-Camden professor of religion. "There’s a lot of natural symbolism. It’s getting lighter and lighter outside and everything is coming back to life,’’ Charme says. “It plays off ancient mythologies of gods who die and are resurrected.’’

Easter celebrations incorporate several symbols, such as eggs and newborn animals, which are found in many cultures to mark the advent of spring, says Charme. The Easter bunny serves a similar purpose. “Eggs and bunnies are classic fertility symbols,’’ he says.

The Easter bunny, however, has evolved into a cuddly anthropomorphized figure that’s about growth as well as procreation, says anthropologist Cindy Dell Clark, a professor at the Rutgers-Camden Center for Childhood Studies who has studied kids’ responses to figures like Santa, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy.

According to Clark, children don’t buy the adult conception of the Easter Bunny, a natty figure in a vest and bow-tie who holds center court at the mall. “At 6 and 7, children know that’s someone dressed as the Easter Bunny, that he’s not the real one,’’ says Clark. “They think the real Easter Bunny is like the one that hops in your yard that you can never catch. He lives in the woods, in nature, rather than dressing and acting like a human.’’

According to Clark, the Easter Bunny symbolizes forces beyond human control.

“He’s a very primal figure for children,’’ she says. “Santa is much more adult-driven than the Easter Bunny. Adults say Christmas is a holiday for children, but if you look at it, you notice that adults are really celebrating what children mean to them.”

While adults have some important jobs at Easter, like managing the egg-dyeing process, children are the ones who nag them to get started, Clark says.

And, she adds, the bunny isn’t a passive figure, dependent on the approval of parents, so much as a “trickster’’ who hides eggs from the very children who color them.

Clark believes the egg hunt is a powerful metaphor. “Children put their favorite colors, their own individual stamp of identity, on each egg. And the eggs are hidden from them and then they have to find them again, just like each person has to find their own potential in the world. It’s certainly more like life than writing a letter and getting what you asked for.”