Here's a question for you: lamb or ham?
Just as there are strong opinions as to whether to place toilet paper on the spindle so it unrolls from the top and over the roll, or from the bottom and under the roll, there are strong opinions as to whether you should eat lamb or ham on Easter.
I don't really remember if we had a family tradition on this, but I always thought it was amusing that people either eat the Lamb of God, or eat ham to prove to everyone that they're not Jewish.
Lamb makes sense to me. Easter is a Christian extension of the Jewish Passover. The Last Supper, after all, was a Passover seder. The reason Jesus was taken down from the cross on the same day he was crucified is that it was Friday evening, the start of the Jewish Sabbath. I'm not quite sure why the Sabbath was a factor, since Jesus was accused as a blasphemer under Jewish law, and crucified in accordance with Roman law. Nevertheless.
The name "Passover" refers to the Egyptian Captivity. To make the Pharaoh release the Israelites, God visited them with a series of ten plagues, the last and worst of which was the death of the firstborn. To let the Angel of Death know they were the good guys, the Israelites marked their doors with the blood of a lamb, which caused the Angel to "pass over" that house without killing anyone. The lamb itself was roasted and eaten.
Having lamb at Easter honors this tradition and this history. Yes, there is a slightly creepy aspect, which is the part that amused me as a kid. Jesus is referred to as "the Lamb of God". Since I did not grow up in a tradition that practiced Communion ("this is my body and this is my blood"), the implied cannibalism always seemed outrageous. However, partaking of lamb on Easter elevates the meal to a symbolic Communion, an acceptance of the sacrifice. The Paschal lamb was sacrificed so that the Angel of Death would pass by; Jesus sacrificed himself as a Paschal Lamb to ensure that Spiritual Death would pass by.
So what about ham? I really can't find any symbolism for this as a traditional Easter dish.
Easter, of course, is also the time of several pagan traditions celebrating the rebirth of life in the spring. The name "Easter" itself comes from the name of the Anglo-Saxon Goddess, Oestre, a goddess of fertility whose name also survives in female reproduction-related words, such as estrus and estrogen. The policy of the early Church in Great Britain was to absorb previous religions, and so the symbols of Oestre were adopted and converted to Christian symbols. Eggs are obvious symbols of fecundity; they were adapted to symbolize the emergence of new spiritual life from the empty tomb.
Rabbits are eaten in some areas of Europe, probably as a symbol of fecundity, but they are rarely eaten in the US, and with the anthropomorphizing of the Easter Bunny, would not be acceptable to children.
The nearest I have come to a justification for having ham comes from the Encyclopedia of Religion, which states that in pre-Christian Europe, pigs were considered lucky. Perhaps, but that doesn't really explain why one eats ham at Easter. More likely might be that pigs were fed all winter, and during lent; now it's spring, and time to slaughter the pigs and reclaim the barn space for the newly born lambs.
Or, as I suggested near the beginning, eating ham simply showed everyone that you were not Jewish.
