Easter doesn’t need to be ‘inclusive’

Customers of a Cadbury outlet store in Spalding, Lincolnshire were surprised and disappointed to find no Easter eggs for sale this week. The shop was instead selling ‘special gesture eggs’, instead of the regular Easter variety. Pictures of the store displays quickly circulated on X and the term ‘gesture egg’ was thoroughly mocked. The shop soon took the displays down and sheepishly reinstated the dreaded E-word, Easter.

Cadbury has since stressed that the outlet was run independently and that it had nothing to do with the rebranding. ‘All Cadbury Easter shell eggs sold in the UK reference Easter very clearly on the packaging, sometimes multiple times’, said an exasperated-sounding statement from Mondelez International, which owns Cadbury.

So it looks like the ‘gesture egg’ saga is a case of a woke shopkeeper gone rogue. But this isn’t the first time that Cadbury has been accused of recoiling from the word Easter. In 2017, it sponsored a National Trust Easter egg trail called the ‘Great British Egg Hunt’. The motivation here was to make the occasion more ‘inclusive’. As Cadbury told the Telegraph at the time: ‘We invite people from all faiths and none to enjoy our seasonal treats.’

Of course you don’t have to be a church-going Christian to enjoy a hunt for chocolate eggs. But surely everyone knows what Easter eggs are and that they exist as part of a long-held Christian tradition. So why bother pretending otherwise?

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