Easter Food Fun Facts: Candy Flowers Internet Shopping

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  • Historic first: nearly 13% of Easter purchases were made online this year.

 

  • Worldwide, the Cadbury's Creme Egg is the most popular variety, with more than 300 million made each year.

 

  • Americans love chocolate — 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies are made for Easter baskets.

 

  • Most of us eat the ear off the chocolate bunny first.

 

  • Easter and Passover account for 18% of the floral purchases made for holidays.

 

  • 16 billion jelly beans are made for Easter each year.

 

  • If all the Easter jelly beans we eat at Easter were laid end to end, they would circle the globe nearly three times.

 

  • Marshmallow PEEPS (baby chicks) outsell jelly beans. More than 1 billion were produced last year.

 

  • Easter egg decorating was brought to <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />America in the early 1700s by Germans who settled in Pennsylvania.

 

  • Ninety million chocolate Easter bunnies are produced each year.

 

  • Chocolate bunnies should be eaten ears first, according to 76% of Americans.

 

  • Adults prefer milk chocolate (65%), to dark chocolate (27%).

 

 

Easter Business Retail Facts

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More Americans will be celebrating Easter this year, helping the retail industry bud and burst into full bloom. Nearly nine out of 10 women and eight out of 10 men plan to celebrate Easter. Apparel, candy, and food sales will be strong and online Easter sales will hit historic highs — up 23% from last year.

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More than half of the $14.4 billion Easter budget will be spent at discount stores. More than one-third, approximately $5.2 billion, of Easter shopping is likely to be spent in department stores. Online Easter sales will edge over the 12% mark for the first time. At nearly 13%, this represents over $1.8 billion dollars in online holiday sales.

 

Easter is the second most important candy-eating occasion of the year for, according to the National Confectioner's Association.

 

Candy, food, gifts, and cards are on most peoples’ lists, with over half of Easter budgets going here.  The earlier Easter date caused many stores to have their colorful Easter merchandise on display right after Valentine’s Day. More Easter shoes and Easter bonnets will be filling the shopping baskets than last year. Over 40% of shoppers told researchers they plan to purchase apparel for the Easter holiday. The 2007 big spending demographic groups (spending more than $140) are those living in the Northeast and young families with children and Easter baskets to fill.

About The Easter Holiday

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Easter is the annual festival commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the principal feast of the Christian year. It is celebrated on Sunday on varying dates between March 22 and April 25 and is therefore called a movable feast. The dates of several others ecclesiastical festivals, extending over a period between Septugesima Sunday (the ninth Sunday before Easter) and the first Sunday of Advent, are fixed in relation to the date of Easter.

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Connected with the observances of Easter are the 40-day penitential season of Lent, beginning on Ash Wednesday and concluding at midnight on Holy Saturday, the day before Easter Sunday; Holy Week, commencing on Palm Sunday, including Good Friday, the day of the crucifixion, and terminating with Holy Saturday; and the Octave of Easter, extending from Easter Sunday through the following Sunday. During the Octave of Easter in early Christian times, the newly baptized wore white garments, white being liturgical color of Easter and signifying light, purity, and joy.

 

The Christian festival of Easter probably embodies a number of converging traditions; most scholars emphasize the original relation of Easter to the Jewish festival of Passover, or Pesach, from which derived Pasch, another name of Easter. The early Christians, many of whom were of Jewish origin, were brought up in the Hebrew tradition and regarded Easter as a new feature of the Passover festival, a commemoration of the advent of the Messiah as foretold by the prophets.

 

References include Funk & Wagnalls, World Almanac

About Jelly Beans – Could Circle The Globe

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Jellybeans Could Circle the Globe

Americans consume 16 billion jellybeans at Easter, many of them hidden in baskets. If all the Easter jellybeans were lined end to end, they would circle the globe nearly three times.

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Jellybeans did not become an Easter tradition until the 1930s. They were probably first made in America by Boston candy maker William Schrafft, who ran advertisements urging people to send jellybeans to soldiers fighting in the Civil War.

 

70% of kids aged 6–11 say they prefer to eat Easter jellybeans one at a time, while 23% report eating several at once. Boys (29%) were more apt to eat a handful than girls (18%).

 

When children were asked about their favorite Easter jellybean flavors, the big winner was cherry.  Cherry (20%), strawberry (12%), grape (10%), lime (7%), and blueberry (6%).

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

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Kamaron Institute captures this famous letter from Virginia O'Hanlon to the editor of The New York Sun, first printed in 1897.

We take pleasure in answering thus prominently the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

Dear Editor

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it's so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?

Virginia O'Hanlon

Dear Virginia,

Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe, except for what they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, and no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world, which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived could tear apart. Only faith, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernatural beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding. No Santa Claus! Thank God! He lives and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Kamaron Institute Famous Christmas memories