- Donald Weder holds the patent for plastic Easter eggs and shredded grass. He also holds a total of 1,411 other U.S. patents — 320 more than Thomas Edison (1,093).
- William Schrafft invented the jellybean in the late 1800s. His original goal was to send them overseas to our soldiers. Americans eat enough at Easter to fill a nine-story building.
- The Easter “bunny” stems from the Anglo-Saxon festival of Eastre, which featured a spring goddess who used the rabbit to represent fertility. When Germans settled in Pennsylvania in the 1700s, they brought the Middle-Ages bunny-with-eggs tradition with them.
- During April showers, when it’s raining cats and dogs in the U.S., in Portugal it’s raining pocket knives. In France it rains ropes, and in Norway it is raining troll women. If you visit South Africa beware of raining old women with clubs.
- Lemons make more sugar than strawberries.
- Blue pigment doesn’t occur in nature. Blue birds, like the blue jay, get their color through light-scattering, microscopic beads spaced on each feather in a way that cancels out everything except blue light.
- Strawberries aren’t berries—neither are raspberries and blackberries. True berries stem from one single-ovary flower and have two or more seeds. Strawberries don’t fit that bill, but bananas, kiwis, and watermelon do.
- April is the 423rd most common name in the United States.
- April Fools’ Day may have begun in 16th century France when the observation of New Year’s changed from April 1st to January 1st. Those who continued to celebrate on April 1st were called “April Fools.”
- Sunflowers save lives… their stems have been used to fill life jackets. Plus, floating sunflower rafts have been used to clean up water contamination from the Chernobyl disaster; their roots remove up to 95 percent of the radioactivity by drawing the contaminants out of the water.