TREATS: Come Easter morning, candy lovers of all ages will be nibbling on chocolate bunnies, yummy jelly beans and yellow, squishy, marshmallow Peeps — before sitting down to a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs. Yeah, right!
For those of you who wonder about Easter and its connection to sweet treats, the following trivia was found on the Infoplease website in an article titled “Sweet Easter Facts” by David Johnson. The following information was pulled from Johnson’s sugary research.
To start with, did you know that Easter is the second most important candy-eating occasion of the year for Americans, who consumed $2.26 billion worth of candy in 2014? Easter candy consumption is only trumped by the Halloween season.
Here are some other fun facts from Johnson:
• Cherry is the most popular jelly bean flavor.
• 87% of parents will buy or make Easter baskets for their children, while 81% will then proceed to steal candy from them.
• 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies are produced each year.
• Every Easter season, Americans buy more than 700 million Marshmallow Peeps, shaped like chicks, as well as Marshmallow Bunnies and Marshmallow Eggs, making them the most popular non-chocolate Easter candy.
• Yellow Peeps are the most popular, followed by pink, lavender, blue and white.
• Americans eat 16 billion jelly beans at Easter, many of them hidden in baskets. If all the Easter jelly beans were lined end to end, they would circle the globe nearly three times.
• Candy is a relatively recent Easter tradition. Chocolate eggs, the most popular Easter candy, were first made in Europe in the early 1800s.
• Hot cross buns were among the earliest Easter treats, made by European monks and given to the poor during Lent.
• Pretzels were originally associated with Easter. The twists of a pretzel were thought to resemble arms crossed in prayer.
• For parents worried their children might eat too much Easter candy, some experts suggest adding non-edible items to Easter baskets such as crayons, movie passes, jump rope, baseball cards, kids’ videos, stencils, markers, paperback books, chalk, Playdoh, stuffed animals or balls.
