The Easter Fires: An Ancient Custom on Texas Hilltops
Near Fredericksburg, Texas
On the Saturday evening before Easter each year, bonfires blaze on more than twenty hilltops flanking Fredericksburg. At the appointed hour, church bells ring across the town, streetlights are switched off, and the dark hills burst simultaneously into flame. The fires are held until the night deepens and the watchers in town are satisfied that Easter is truly coming.
The Easter fire tradition has roots older than Christianity itself. The practice of lighting fires on hills during the spring equinox period was observed in northern Germany long before the Christian era, part of a pagan spring festival, and when it entered Teutonic Christianity it was absorbed rather than extinguished. The settlers who came from Westphalia and Lower Saxony brought the custom to the Texas Hill Country, where the landscape provided natural high points perfectly suited for the fires.
A local legend grew up around the custom: that a mother in the earliest years of the settlement, seeing her children frightened by the fires blazing on the distant hills during a tense period, told them that the Easter Rabbit and his helpers had lit the fires to cook and decorate eggs before distributing them on Easter morning. Historians note that the precise dates of the Meusebach treaty negotiations and the timing of Easter eighteen forty-seven do not quite match the legend, but the story has endured alongside the fires. Fredericksburg's Easter fire tradition is the only surviving one of its kind in the United States.
