Happy HumpDay!
Happy HumpDay! Do you love learning something new each week? Maybe your friends and family would like to learn some cool stuff too?! If you know someone who has a thirst for useless but entertaining knowledge, feel free to forward this email to them and have them subscribe!!!! As always, check out the HumpDay website at HumpDayNewsletter.com and follow the official HumpDay Instagram!
Mythology
Last Sunday was the Christian holiday Easter which celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Most people are familiar with the story, but have you ever wondered why we call the holiday “Easter”? What does Easter mean? Why don’t we call it resurrection day or something? First, last Sunday’s holiday is not called Easter in every language. In Spanish, its called “Pascua” which roughly translates to “Passover”. Passover is a Jewish holiday celebrating the freeing of Egyptian Jews from slavery. Although the story of Easter has nothing to do with Passover, the last supper with Jesus and his disciples was a Passover satyr (traditional dinner) so Easter occurred on the same week as Passover, so the name carried over. The word Easter comes from an entirely different religion. In ancient Germany, the Germanic people used to worship a goddess called Eostre (pronounced like Easter). Eostre was a fertility goddess who was worshipped during the springtime as life returned to the plants and trees outside. As Christianity spread through Europe, pagan religious festivals were converted into Christian holidays. Rather than celebrating the festival for Eostre at the beginning of spring, the Germanic people celebrated the resurrection of Christ instead. Although the spirit of the holiday changed, the name in German didn’t. People in ancient times continued to refer to the celebration at the beginning of spring as “Easter” and soon enough the holiday became known as Easter. Just goes to show you that it doesn’t matter what the party is for or what its called, people are always up for a good time. When Was Jesus Really Born? STARZ- American Gods Trailer
World Cultures
As mentioned in the above section, Easter is closely related to an ancient tradition that used to celebrate the beginning of spring and the return of life to the world. It turns out that similar spring celebrations are common in cultures all over the world. The common threads from the spring festivals celebrated in different cultures have all come together to impact how we celebrate Easter today. In cultures all over the world, people view the beginning of spring as the coming of new life to the earth. This coming of new life has often been translated to fertility, and many of the spring festivities around the world celebrate fertility in April/May as spring arrives. Some of the most common symbols from fertility festivals are eggs and rabbits and those symbols were directly translated into our Easter traditions. Eggs are a pretty obvious representation of new life and have been featured in pagan fertility celebrations for centuries. As easter merged with other spring festivities, the egg remained a consistent feature of the celebration. In the 13th century, catholics that couldn’t eat eggs on Fridays during lent would decorate the eggs that they harvested instead of eating them. This tradition of decorating eggs became a traditional celebration of lent and eventually a staple of celebrating Easter. Rabbits were also traditional symbols of fertility because of how often they can have litters of bunnies. On average, a rabbit can have a new litter of babies every month and each litter can have up to 12 offspring, for a potential birth rate of 144 baby bunnies each year (cute but aggressive). Because rabbits can have babies so fast and so often, they are the perfect representation of fertility. Rabbits connection to fertility lead ancient cultures to associated rabbits with spring and celebrated them during their spring festivals. Like eggs, the imagery of rabbits carried over to Easter and spawned the creation of the Easter bunny that we know today. The World’s Biggest Rabbit The Pink Rabbit Cocktail
Games & Entertainment
With all that is going on in the world, its not surprising that people started hoarding everyday essentials like toilet paper and flour. People’s massive stashes of canned goods will likely last them for months but what would it take to have enough supplies to be set for life? Winning a life time supply should cover it, but what does winning a lifetime supply actually get you? There are actually pretty strict laws dictating promotions that promise prizes that say the prizes must match the promotion to a reasonable degree. When determining if a prize lives up to what was promised, companies conduct a “reasonableness” test to determine if a reasonable person would agree that the prize is fair. This “reasonableness test” usually involves an assumption about how much of something a person consumes on a daily basis and calculates the prize based on that assumption. For example, a contest where the winner won a year supply of tide pods provided the winner with 365 tide pods (~$90 worth) based on the assumption that someone would do laundry once per day (also assumes that nobody will eat the pods). Figuring out prizes that promise a “Lifetime Supply” can require a fairly morbid calculation. When the website Gumball.com gave out a lifetime supply of gumballs, they calculated the winner’s life expectancy and subtracted their age to determine how many years the winner had left to live. They then gave the person 365 gumballs for each year that the person was expected to be alive (1 gumball per day for the rest of your life? Pretty sweet!). The rules for determining how many years to include in a lifetime supply are really flexible and there doesn’t need to be an exact calculation. A Burger King promotion gave the winner of a lifetime supply a $500 every six months for 25 years. It may not be an exact calculation but if you eat $25,000 worth of Burger King, your life expectancy probably isn’t that high.
This Week in History
On this week in 1917, The United States Senate officially declared war on Germany and entered the U.S. into World War I. WWI started in 1914 with the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. When the war broke out, President Woodrow Wilson announced that the U.S. would remain neutral in the conflict going on in Europe. In 1916, German submarines destroyed a passenger boat known as the Lusitania. The U.S. demanded that the Germans cease attacking civilian ships and the Germans complied but in 1917, the Germans announced that they would resume attacking all ships in enemy waters. This announcement triggered outrage in the states and led to the U.S. finally joining the war.
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