Religious history and significance
The Easter story across the Gospels. Holy Week (Palm Sunday through Easter Sunday). Trivia rewards Bible literacy.
Q1.In the Christian calendar, what event does Easter Sunday commemorate?Tap to reveal
Answer: The resurrection of Jesus
Easter is the oldest annual festival in Christianity, observed by the church centuries before Christmas became a fixed feast.
Q2.What is the name of the Friday in Holy Week that marks the crucifixion?Tap to reveal
Answer: Good Friday
The name preserves an archaic English sense of good meaning holy or pious, which is why solemn days could be called good at all.
Q3.What season of fasting and reflection, lasting 40 days, leads up to Easter?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lent
The 40 days are counted without Sundays, which is why Lent stretches across roughly six calendar weeks rather than fewer.
Q4.What is the name of the Sunday before Easter, when Christians remember Jesus entering Jerusalem?Tap to reveal
Answer: Palm Sunday
Many churches keep the distributed palms and burn them the following year to make the ashes used on Ash Wednesday.
Q5.Which day of Holy Week commemorates the Last Supper?Tap to reveal
Answer: Maundy Thursday
Maundy comes from the Latin mandatum, or commandment, taken from the new commandment Jesus gives at that supper.
Q6.Easter Sunday falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after which event?Tap to reveal
Answer: The spring equinox
Churches calculate from a fixed ecclesiastical equinox of 21 March rather than the true astronomical one, so the church date and the sky can disagree by a day.
Q7.According to the Gospels, which Jewish festival was Jesus in Jerusalem to observe during the events of Holy Week?Tap to reveal
Answer: Passover
Most languages name Easter after it directly, since the Greek and Latin Pascha comes straight from the Hebrew Pesach.
Q8.Eastern Orthodox churches usually celebrate Easter on a different date because they reckon it using which calendar?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Julian calendar
The Julian and Gregorian reckonings currently run 13 days apart, and the two Easters can land as much as five weeks from each other.
Q9.Which eighth-century English monk wrote that the English word Easter came from a goddess named Eostre?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Venerable Bede
Bede is the only early source that mentions Eostre, which is why some historians still doubt how widely she was actually venerated.
Q10.What is the name of the large candle lit at the Easter Vigil and used through the year at baptisms?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Paschal candle
It is traditionally inscribed with the current year and the Greek letters alpha and omega before it is lit.
Easter Bunny and chocolate eggs
Where did the Easter Bunny come from? Why eggs? Why chocolate? The commercialization of Easter has its own trivia.
Q1.Pale Easter bunnies and eggs are often moulded from which type of chocolate, made with cocoa butter but no cocoa solids?Tap to reveal
Answer: White chocolate
Because it contains no cocoa solids, several countries once refused to let it be sold under the name chocolate at all.
Q2.What is the name of the marshmallow chicks sold by the millions each Easter in the United States?Tap to reveal
Answer: Peeps
The earliest ones were piped into shape by hand before the company mechanised production in the 1950s.
Q3.Which British chocolate company sells the Creme Egg?Tap to reveal
Answer: Cadbury
The firm had been selling hollow chocolate Easter eggs since the 1870s, long before this filled version and its name appeared.
Q4.Settlers from which country brought the egg-laying Easter hare, the Osterhase, to America?Tap to reveal
Answer: Germany
Pennsylvania Dutch children built nests out of caps and bonnets in the garden for the hare to fill overnight.
Q5.Which British firm produced the first hollow chocolate Easter egg in 1873?Tap to reveal
Answer: Fry's
Cadbury followed about two years later, and Fry's was eventually absorbed into the very rival it had beaten to the idea.
Q6.In parts of Switzerland, which bird traditionally brings the Easter eggs instead of a hare?Tap to reveal
Answer: The cuckoo
German-speaking regions each had their own egg bringer, including a fox in Westphalia and a stork in Thuringia.
Q7.Which native marsupial is sold in chocolate form in Australia as an alternative to the Easter Bunny?Tap to reveal
Answer: The bilby
Rabbits are a destructive introduced pest there, and a share of the proceeds from the chocolate version goes to conservation of the real animal, which the IUCN lists as vulnerable.
Q8.Mass-produced chocolate eggs became possible after a Dutch chemist invented a press that separated cocoa butter from the bean. What was his surname?Tap to reveal
Answer: Van Houten
The same press, patented in 1828, gave the world cocoa powder and the alkalised dutch process cocoa named after him.
Q9.What is the name of the controlled heating and cooling that makes a moulded chocolate egg set glossy and snap cleanly?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tempering
Cocoa butter can crystallise in six different forms and only one of them produces that shine, snap and resistance to melting in the hand.
Easter food traditions
Hot cross buns (origin), Easter ham (American tradition), lamb (older tradition), simnel cake. Food trivia at the table.
Q1.What spiced fruit bun marked with a cross is traditionally eaten on Good Friday?Tap to reveal
Answer: Hot cross buns
The cross is properly piped in a flour and water paste rather than icing, so it does not sweeten the bun.
Q2.Which meat is the most traditional centrepiece of Easter dinner across Britain and much of Europe?Tap to reveal
Answer: Lamb
The choice reaches back through the Passover lamb and the Lamb of God imagery that runs through Easter liturgy.
Q3.In Greek Orthodox tradition, hard-boiled Easter eggs are dyed one particular colour. Which?Tap to reveal
Answer: Red
The colour stands for the blood of Christ, and the first egg dyed is often set aside and kept in the house all year.
Q4.What is the tall, cylindrical Russian Easter cake topped with white icing called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kulich
It is taken to church to be blessed alongside paskha, a pyramid of sweetened curd cheese pressed in a wooden mould.
Q5.Which Italian Easter bread is baked in the shape of a bird and treated as the Easter counterpart to panettone?Tap to reveal
Answer: Colomba
The name means dove, and the enriched dough is finished with an almond and sugar crust rather than icing.
Q6.What is the Polish tradition of taking a basket of food to church to be blessed at Easter called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Swieconka
The basket almost always includes a lamb modelled in butter or sugar, alongside salt, bread and decorated eggs.
Q7.In Britain, the last day before Lent, when eggs, butter and fat are used up, is popularly called Pancake Day. What is its traditional church name?Tap to reveal
Answer: Shrove Tuesday
The older name comes from shriving, the confession made before the fast began, and has nothing to do with anything cooked in a pan.
Q8.What sweet, braided Greek Easter bread is baked with red eggs pressed into the plait?Tap to reveal
Answer: Tsoureki
Its distinctive flavour comes from mahlepi, ground cherry kernels, and mastiha resin rather than from vanilla.
Q9.Which traditional English Easter cake is topped with eleven marzipan balls?Tap to reveal
Answer: Simnel cake
There are eleven rather than twelve because the balls stand for the apostles with Judas left out.
Q10.What dark, sweet malted rye dessert is eaten at Easter in Finland?Tap to reveal
Answer: Mammi
It was traditionally baked and served in a box of birch bark, and it is eaten cold with cream and sugar.
Easter around the world
Greek Orthodox dates, Spanish Semana Santa, German Osterhase, Polish Świecenie. The diversity of Easter celebration.
Q1.What is the name of the annual children's egg event held on the South Lawn of the White House?Tap to reveal
Answer: The White House Easter Egg Roll
It moved onto the White House grounds in 1878 after children were barred from rolling eggs on the Capitol lawns.
Q2.Because Easter falls in March or April, in which hemisphere is it an autumn festival rather than a spring one?Tap to reveal
Answer: The Southern Hemisphere
Australian and New Zealand Easter traditions lean on camping and harvest weather instead of the spring flowers of European imagery.
Q3.From the balcony of which basilica does the Pope deliver his Easter Urbi et Orbi blessing?Tap to reveal
Answer: St Peter's Basilica
Urbi et Orbi means to the city and to the world, and the formal blessing is given only a handful of times each year.
Q4.The city of Antigua, famous for its Holy Week carpets of dyed sawdust, is in which country?Tap to reveal
Answer: Guatemala
The carpets take entire nights to lay and are deliberately destroyed within minutes as the procession walks straight over them.
Q5.In Sweden and Finland, children dress up as what figure at Easter and go door to door for sweets?Tap to reveal
Answer: Witches
The custom grew out of a folk belief that witches flew off to a legendary island called Blakulla on Maundy Thursday and stayed there with the devil until Easter.
Q6.What do men in Poland and Hungary traditionally do to women on Easter Monday?Tap to reveal
Answer: Throw water over them
Known as Smigus-Dyngus in Poland, the drenching was believed to bring the person health and fertility for the coming year.
Q7.On the Greek island of Corfu, what do residents throw from their balconies on Holy Saturday morning?Tap to reveal
Answer: Clay pots
The pots are filled with water before being smashed, and the noise is said to drive out the old year and welcome spring.
Q8.In Bermuda, what do families traditionally fly on Good Friday?Tap to reveal
Answer: Kites
The kites are typically hexagonal and built to hum in the wind, and the local story credits a teacher who used one to explain the Ascension.
Q9.Which Spanish city is best known for its Semana Santa processions of hooded penitents and enormous floats?Tap to reveal
Answer: Seville
The floats, called pasos, are carried on the necks and shoulders of teams of bearers hidden underneath the draped skirts.
Q10.In Norway, what genre of books and television is traditionally consumed over the Easter holiday?Tap to reveal
Answer: Crime fiction
The habit, called paskekrim, is usually traced to a 1923 novel advertised on a newspaper front page so convincingly that readers took it for real news.
Q11.In the Czech Republic and Slovakia, what is the braided willow whip used in Easter Monday customs called?Tap to reveal
Answer: Pomlazka
Willow is chosen because it buds first in spring, and the light whipping is meant to pass that vitality on to the person struck.
Hosting Easter trivia
Easter trivia works for any age. Religious rounds for church groups; food and bunny rounds for family events. Add an 'egg hunt clue' round for kid-friendly twist.
Trivio.NET has Easter packs in the Holidays & Events category.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the most-missed Easter trivia question?
Why is Easter on different dates? (Lunar calendar: first Sunday after first full moon after spring equinox.)
Should Easter trivia be religious or secular?
Pick based on audience. Mix lightly for general groups; deeper religious content for church gatherings.
Where can I find Easter trivia packs?
Trivio.NET's Holidays & Events category has Easter-specific packs.
Are Easter trivia questions appropriate for kids?
Most — Easter Bunny, eggs, food. Religious story questions appropriate at age 8+.
