Easter Branches 2025

So what are Easter branches?

Easter branches are a North and Central European tradition, where you cut (or buy) bare branches in the run-up to Easter, put them in a vase and decorate with painted eggs or other festive decorations. The branches will then sprout in the vase. Here is an explanation in English from Southern Living. There’s also an outdoor version where a tree or bush in the garden is decorated with colourful eggs, mostly plastic for durability. It’s basically the Easter equivalent of a Christmas tree.

When I was a kid, we always had Easter branches. There is a photo of me aged about three or four sitting on a chair with that year’s Easter branches on the table next to me. We even set up Easter branches when we spent Easter abroad. When Dad was working in Singapore in 1982/83 and Mom and I spent the Easter holidays with him, we brought our decorations along and had Easter branches in Singapore, which were a minor sensation among our neighbours, because the tradition wasn’t known there at all.

As I grew older, my parents eventually stopped putting up Easter branches and Easter decorations in the house were limited to a few decorative bunny figurines and two collectible Hutschenreuther porcelain eggs which either Mom or I had gotten as a gift. Collectible Hutschenreuther holiday ornaments are a popular gift (though not really suitable for putting on a Christmas tree or Easter branches, because they’re too heavy) and I have a lot of Christmas ones that accumulated over the years. But for some reason, I have only two Easter eggs.

Fast forward to last year. In early March, shortly after Mom died, I chanced to walk past a flower shop and saw Easter branches for sale, because it was the season. And I thought, “I haven’t had Easter branches in years. So why don’t I buy some and put them up to make the house cheerier?”

So I bought the branches, realised that I couldn’t find our old Easter branch decorations (I’m still waiting for them to show up in some unexpected place), so I bought new decorations. And because I enjoyed bringing some springtime cheer into my home last year, I decided to set up Easter branches again this year. Besides, I do have decorations now.

Since I had an appointment in the city center, I went to the Bremen flower market, which is clustered around the Church of Our Lady, and got some Easter branches, because they are fresher and cheaper at the market than at a flower shop.

There was a nice variety of branches on offer. Cherry, pussy willow, forsythia, birch tree, juneberry. I chose corkscrew hazel, because I like the way they look. And since Easter is late April, there is a chance that blossoming branches like cherry, forsythia or juneberry will be wilted by then. Pussy willow and birch are messy and besides, I’m allergic to birch pollen, so bringing it into the house isn’t a great idea.

Of course, you can also cut your own branches, if you have a suitable tree in the garden. And in fact, that’s what Dad did, when I was a kid. I think we had mostly birch branches, because we had a birch tree in the garden. I have no idea what we used in Singapore.

At home, I put the corkscrew hazel branches into a large mid century modern vase of my Mom’s and added the decorations. Here is the result:

The vase with the Easter branches on the kitchen table, where I decorated it.

The Easter branches in their final location in the dining room/parlour.

And here is a closer look at the guardian bunnies:

Three bunnies guard the Easter branches.

The two smaller bunnies were my Mom’s and are probably between fifty and sixty years old. At any rate, we’ve had them for as long as I can remember.

The white laughing bunny was designed by Max Hermann Fritz in 1929 for the Rosenthal porcelain company. Rosenthal produced this bunny for decades (though apparently he has been discontinued by now) and for a while it seemed as if every German home had one.

The gun-toting pink bunny is Plundor the Spoiler from the Masters of the Universe Classics toyline. Plundor is an obscure villain who only appeared in a single episode of the Filmation He-Man cartoon. In the cartoon, Plundor has taken over the planet Trannis, where he steals natural resources, extracts the planet’s lifeforce and pollutes the environment until he is stopped by an amnesiac He-Man and a local woman named Gleedil, who looks like a humanoid chicken. In short, it’s a not very subtle tale about the evils of capitalism and pollution, except that the villain is a pink bunny. Sometimes, I really wonder just what they put into the water cooler at Filmation.

When Plundor appeared as an action figure in the Masters of the Universe Classics toyline, many people disliked him, because Masters of the Universe Classics was a serious toyline for serious people and they’d rather forget that He-Man once fought an evil pink bunny. So I got my Plundor for a good price and he makes a great Easter decoration. He also has an eerie facial resemblance to the Rosenthal bunny, which I only noticed when I put them next to each other. Now I wonder if someone at Filmation had this Rosenthal bunny at home.