“The observance of “Easter Sunday” in New England except by Roman Catholics and Episcopalians is quite recent. In this village, I do not think there was any particular observance previous to 1870,” wrote Diarist Andrew Walker in the Spring of 1883.

By then, homegrown lily displays adorned every pulpit in every church in the Kennebunks on Easter Sunday. Sermons focused on resurrection, rebirth and seizing yet another new chance to set things right.

Thinly veiled Pagen references to fertility, like bunnies who deliver colored eggs they lay to waiting baskets all over town were still few and far between in the Kennebunks, even though the first official White House egg roll had occurred in 1878, when Rutherford B. Hayes was President. The Kennebunkport Historical Society has a sizable collection of Official White House Easter Eggs from the President George H.W. Bush Administration.

Annie Joyce Crediford, the first woman in the Kennebunks to own and operate her own newspapers, namely The Seaside Echo and The Kennebunk Enterprise, embraced the “modern” take on Easter. She often celebrated it with full color art nouveau cover illustrations created by George Ryder, one of the early illustrators for Home Publishing Company’s pulp fiction publication, Gunter’s Magazine. Those Easter issues of Annie’s newspapers were full of commercial ads for Easter clothing, hats, chocolates, etc.

To each their own.