The origins of Easter are even more gruesome than the current plague of foot-and-mouth.
Chapter XII of Exodus tell us how Moses received a tipoff from the Lord that on a certain night the destroying angel would come down and kill every first-born in the land of Egypt. The captive Israelites, however, were advised to slaughter a lamb, and to "take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the door frames of their houses" - as a sign for the destroying angel to "pass over" those particular houses. And so it happened. The angel duly "passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians".
The Egyptians for their part were, quite understandably, so upset about their slaughtered offspring that they allowed the Israelites to leave the land of Egypt - and the rest is history.
The Christian Easter is related to this ancient Jewish festival of Passover through its association with the Resurrection. But its name, according to the Venerable Bede, whose pronouncements on these topics are rarely challenged, derives from an older tradition: it comes from Eostre, the old Teutonic Goddess of the Dawn, whose heathen festival was held around the Vernal Equinox. And related in turn to this festival is the belief common in ancient times that the sun danced on an Easter Sunday morning.
The 17th-century poet John Suckling, for example, alludes to this phenomenon while contemplating the Terpsichorean perfection of a young lady of his acquaintance: But Oh, she dances such a way; No sun upon an Easter day Is half so fine a sight. The explanation for this belief may lie in the fact that long after sacrifices to Eostre were abandoned, it remained the custom to rise early on an Easter morning to observe the dawn and, as in the case of moving statues, people concentrating on the rising sun may have imagined things they did not really see. When the sun is low in the sky, its ray must travel a very long distance through the earth's atmosphere to reach an observer, and refraction or "bending" of the light beams sometimes results in strange optical effects. Under certain atmospheric conditions the sun may assume strange shapes: it may resemble a loaf of bread, a mushroom, or a fish - or even appear to be divided into two or more parts. These optical changes sometimes follow one another in quick succession and with the help of a little imagination, it was not difficult for our ancestors to believe that the Easter sun really was dancing on the horizon.