Valentine’s Day has roses. Christmas has evergreens and holly. Easter has the Easter Lily.
This beautiful, trumpet-shaped lily has been a common decoration since the early days of the Christian church to celebrate Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. Even today, in religious and non-religious settings, this flower remains a hallmark of the Easter season. But why?
The answer is partly found in their color.
White has long been a color that represents purity, innocence, rebirth, and other such virtues throughout the world. If a red rose can symbolize one’s love and passion for another, then a white lily can certainly serve as a symbol for what some consider the holiest celebration of the year.
This plant’s color and what it represents also happen to coincide with the beginning of spring, a time most associated with new life, beauty, and hope. What better herald for the advent of that time than this ancient flower?
Another reason these flowers are frequent during the Easter season is the Christian lore behind them. Flowers, particularly lilies, were often used in the Bible as a symbol of the love and care God had for his people. Jesus himself used this picture of lilies in his Sermon on the Mount teaching:
“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” – Matthew 6:28-29.
Based on their purifying color and Christ’s mention of them in the Gospels, early Christians began to incorporate the flower into their traditional beliefs about the Easter holiday, even at one time referring to the flower as “white-robed apostles of hope.” One tradition states that these lilies sprouted from the ground where Christ’s blood and tears fell during the crucifixion and in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Other traditions associate these flowers, since they are symbols of purity, with the Virgin Mary and other saints found within the Bible. Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, The Annunciation, contains these white lilies as they are handed to Mother Mary by the angel Gabriel. Some doctrine says Mary’s tomb was opened and contained nothing but white lilies inside. These flowers are also sometimes associated with Eve, the first woman, saying they sprang up from her tears after the Fall in the Garden of Eden.
None of these stories are actually found in the Bible, but are simply the telling of centuries of church tradition and storytelling. But, they are the reason why this flower became so popular for the Easter season.
This symbolic flower originates from the Ryukyu Islands in Japan. Up until the end of WWII, this was where most Easter lilies were grown and imported from. Then, at the close of the war, American soldier Louis Houghton was said to have brought home a case of the increasingly scarce but ever-popular Easter lily bulbs. He sold them to producers along the Pacific Northwest, specifically to those residing along the Smith River from California to Oregon, which to this day remains the “Easter Lily Capital of the World.”
And there you have it, the brief history of the Easter lily. From the blood-soaked ground of ancient Israel to the farms of the American Pacific Northwest, this flower has made quite an impression to last this long in the history of a holiday nearly two thousand years old.
But it’s not merely the flower that’s endured, it’s what it represents. New life, hope, and purity are virtues that are timeless, no matter what religion you are from. For all of us, this flower is a picture of the life that could be, that will be, with a little faith.