A look at the symbols of this day, which blends Christian and spring traditions. Perhaps more than any other holiday, Easter is a blend of the Christian and the pagan. As our holiday treat to you, here are some facts and trivia about the annual spring celebration.

Easter and related days
•Easter Sunday is the day Christians celebrate the key event of their faith, the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion.

•Lent is the 40-day period leading up to Easter. For many Christians, it is a time for fasting, reflection and repentance in preparation for Easter Sunday. In most Western church traditions, Lent is actually 46 days long because Sundays aren’t counted.

•Ash Wednesday begins Lent for most Western churches. It takes its name from the practice of public penitents dressing in sackcloth and wearing ashes in the early days of the Christian faith. In some Christian churches, ashes are put on the foreheads of worshippers to remind them to be penitent. Lent in Orthodox churches begins on Clean Monday.

•Holy Week is the week leading up to Easter Sunday. It includes Good Friday, the day Christians remember the Crucifixion of Jesus.

When is Easter?
•Unlike Christmas and Columbus Day, which are fixed on the calendar, the date for Easter floats around a bit. It doesn’t fall on the anniversary of the date it commemorates. Instead, the date of Easter is determined by a formula first set up by the Christian church way back in the 350s. It’s been revised and updated over the centuries as changes have been made to the western calendar system.

In most western churches, Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring.

•But it’s not necessarily the full moon, and it isn’t necessarily the first day of spring. The date of the full moon isn’t the night the moon is full in the sky, it’s a date established by astronomers and mathematicians in the 1500s. And the first date of spring isn’t necessarily the astronomical vernal equinox. It, too, is a date fixed in tables.

•And not everybody’s Easter is the same day. The Orthodox Christian Church and some other “Eastern” churches base their celebrations on the Julian Calendar, which predates the Gregorian Calendar established in 1582. Some years, both Easter celebrations fall on the same Sunday, but this year, the Orthodox Easter will be celebrated April 27.

In the basket
•Peeps, those marshmallow treats shaped like baby chicks, were developed in Bethlehem, Pa., in the 1950s by Sam Born, a Russian-born candy maker who came to the United States in 1910. The company he founded, Just Born, produces more than 1.2 billion Peeps a year. During the height of Easter production, the factory pumps out 4.2 million of them a day.

•More than 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies are produced each year. According to a poll, 76 percent of Americans prefer to bite off the ears of the bunny first.

•Jelly beans probably developed from the Middle Eastern fruit candy known as Turkish Delight. They weren’t associated with Easter until the 1930s.

•Each year, manufacturers crank out more than 16 billion jelly beans for Easter.

•Cream-filled eggs have been around since the 1920s, but it wasn’t until 1971 that candy company Cadbury produced its first Cadbury Creme Egg. The company makes 300 million of them each year, but sells them only from New Years to Easter.

Other traditions
•On Easter Sunday in Russia, anyone may enter the belfries of a church and ring the bells.

•In northern England, men prowl the streets on Easter Sunday looking for women to lift three times. In return, they get an kiss or a coin.

•In Bavaria in the 15th century, it became a custom for priests to tell funny stories during Easter Mass. Telling jokes and laughing on Easter became all the rage, until Pope Clement X, thinking the custom unseemly, prohibited it in the 1670s.

•In France and Germany, sports, especially handball, were a part of the Easter tradition. In some cases, servants would play ball against their masters, and even priests and monks would compete.

Eggs, bunnies, baskets and lilies
•The word “Easter” doesn’t have anything to do with the Christian celebration. It is derived from the name of a German deity, Estre or Ostra. She was the goddess of the rising sun and spring, and was celebrated in springtime festivals.

•Eggs, which are laid by birds and from which new birds emerge, were symbols of new life and rebirth long before the Christian era began. In the early days of the church, the consumption of eggs during Lent was prohibited, so decorating them and giving them as gifts on Easter became a way of celebrating the resurrection.

•In some parts of Europe, Easter eggs are a tradtional gift godparents give to their godchildren.

•Like eggs, baby chicks are associated with spring and new life, and therefore were adopted as Easter symbols.

•Children have been gathering on the lawn of the White House to roll Easter Eggs since 1878.

•Rabbits, too, are an ancient pagan symbol. They represent fertility and are associated with the reawakening of the land in springtime. Bunnies were first associated with Easter celebrations in the 1500s, and by the early 1800s, German bakers were selling Easter bunnies made from chocolate and pastry.

•The tradition of the Easter Bunny bringing gifts to children Easter morning is also from Germany, where he was known as Oschter Haws. Initially, the bunny left his treats in a nest made for him by children. Later, the tradition merged with the notion of the Easter basket.

•The tradition of Easter baskets probably dates from the early Christian practice of taking a basket of food, often the foods that were prohibited during Lent, to church for a blessing before the Easter feast.

•The Easter lily, Lilium longiflorium, is said to have grown in the Garden of Gethsemane, where, the Bible says, Jesus prayed before his crucifixion. Because it grows in spring and is white, it symbolizes rebirth and purity.