The most unique Easter traditions from across the world

The Easter Bilby | Australia

Move over Easter Bunny, there's a new festive fauna in town. The Easter Bilby is Australia's very own magical marsupial, introduced in the 1990s as an alternative to the Easter Bunny.

With long ears and hoppy legs, which is about as far as the similarities go, the bilby is the closest thing Australia has to a rabbit. Unfortunately the bilby is now a threatened species, which is why it has replaced the Easter Bunny in Australia – to raise awareness for this unique animal and protect its environment.

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Wet Monday | Hungary

Easter Monday in Hungary has another name: Húsvéti locsolkodás. This translates to 'Wet Monday' or *checks notes* 'the watering of the girls'. This unique custom involves, at least traditionally, young men or boys splashing women and girls with buckets of water to encourage fertility and health. So that's nice. More modern interpretations of the tradition focus on spraying the women with perfume instead, which we think is much nicer.

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Egg tapping | Croatia

This fun little game happens every Easter in Croatia. You take a hard-boiled egg, painted in a variety of colours of course, and tap it against your opponent's egg until one of them cracks. The winner gets to keep all the cracked eggs for themself. What a lovely prize.

If you're serious about winning you can always cheat and use an indestructible wooden egg. Just don't tell anyone.

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Easter witches | Finland

If you swap Easter bonnets and egg hunts for witches' hats and off-brand trick or treating and you have Virpominen. A fun tradition that takes place on the Sunday before Easter, it involves children dressing as witches and knocking on doors to offer a blessing in return for sweets or chocolate eggs.

This all originates from Finnish folklore that tells of witches roaming the countryside at the start of spring. What better way to scare them off than a blessing from a hungry child?

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Kite flying | Bermuda

Pull up your Bermuda shorts and go fly a kite. On Good Friday every year in Bermuda everyone takes to the open air to fly homemade kites crafted from tissue paper, cloth and wood.

This is a very serious event in the Bermudan calendar with lots of intricately engineered kites, including some that require a team of people to operate and others that hum as they zoom through the air.