I’m Jewish in a Christian country, which means my understanding of Christian holidays has always been a patchwork of guesses and fragments. Christianity was never explained to me, it was something I absorbed through other people’s stories. So I carried these half-formed childlike ideas about the religion into adulthood, like what I thought Easter was.

I wished a group chat of friends a happy Easter, then added a comment about rabbits and how fun it must be to hunt for eggs. Everyone stared at me like I grew a second head. Gently, they asked me to explain.

I said: ‘On Easter, a rabbit that lays colourful eggs, right?’

Right?

Almost in unison, they asked where I’d gotten the idea, and told me it wasn’t right.

I was confused. In my mind, Easter featured a mythological rabbit that appeared once a year to lay eggs. I never questioned the biology of it. Of course, rabbits don’t lay eggs, but if angels and demons could exist in Christian mythology, why not an egg-laying rabbit? I knew Jesus was somehow involved too, I just didn’t know how any of it connected.

My friends explained to me that Easter is a Sunday holiday that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, three days after his crucifixion on Good Friday. It’s tied to the whole season of Lent, the 40-day period of fasting and repentance, starting on Ash Wednesday. I had no idea these were all connected, or even that Lent involved fasting at all. To me, Christianity was just vaguely about repentance.

The truth is, I never had to interrogate my understanding of Easter. Christianity existed in the margins of my life, never in the centre.

After that conversation, I got curious.

I messaged several Jewish friends and asked them – without Googling – what they thought Easter was. Most knew it had something to do with Jesus, but the beyond that, the answers were varied. One colleague from New York City thought Easter involved children hunting down a rabbit that polluted eggs with colour. A friend in England imagined a woman with rabbits, loosely inspired by the pagan figure Ēostre. A Polish friend had a similar image, but with rabbits painting eggs. My mother believed a magical rabbit hid eggs for children to find, then killed afterwards. Others skipped the rabbit entirely and pictured eggs magically appearing, and finding one brought good luck.

It became clear as Jews we’d never needed to define Easter for ourselves. Our minds filled in the gaps and built fairytale versions of the holiday from scattered cultural clues. And it turned into a fascinating cultural exercise – asking non-Christians what they thought Easter was, then comparing it to what it actually is. None of us could pinpoint where our ideas came from, and most of us, myself included, were genuinely surprised to learn there is no rabbit at all.

Later, my mother compared Easter to Halloween. Is Halloween real? Not really. Its origin is All Hallow’s Day, but what we experience is something entirely different, children dressing up as ghosts, zombies, and fictional characters. In her mind, Easter was similar, a child-focused holiday about searching for colourful eggs with the egg symbolising the ‘hatching’ of Jesus. His resurrection.

Now as an adult, I find it funny that my understanding of Easter was so far off. It feels a bit like Alice in Wonderland, chasing a rabbit down a hole that leads somewhere completely unexpected. If anything, it’s given me a question to keep in my back pocket when I meet new people who didn’t grow up in Christian households.

What do you think Easter is?