Old Wives Tale Says Rain On Easter Means This

Yesterday was Easter Sunday, and I hope you got your fill of food and hardy laughs. I know I had 3 too many rolls and ate more mashed potatoes than any self-respecting person should. However, the other thing we got this Easter was a rainy morning, and if an old wives tale is to be believed, we could have something to look forward to the next couple of weeks.

Easter Wives Tale

We were sitting around the table yesterday and my Grandma said "Well since it rained today, we're going to get rain for the next seven Sundays!", to which we all replied with furrowed brows and confused looks.

I am unsure what the correlation between rainy Easters and successive rain is. This is one of a couple of different Springtime sayings, like what the groundhog's shadow means, "April showers bring May flowers", and things like that.

Our friends over at 98.1 KHAK provided some other Easter sayings for us:

"If there is enough rain on Easter Sunday to wet a pocket handkerchief, there will be a good crop year."

"The sun never shines on Good Friday."

"In whatever direction the wind blows on Good Friday, it will blow for forty days."

How Accurate Is The Phrase?

To check the validity of this old tale, we will utilize two sites. The U.S. Census Bureau kindly has all the past Easter dates since 1600 AD in one convenient spot, so finding past Easters is pretty easy. To see past precipitation, we'll consult the site wunderground.com, which has an encyclopedic history of past weather.

Since 2000 (because I do not get paid enough to go any further back and this is already too much math), it has rained on Easter eight times ('02, '03, '07, '10, '12, '16, '20, '24). Among these years with rain on Easter, none of them had seven Sundays of successive rain. This is not a concrete experiment obviously since we're only using dates since 2000, but it doesn't bode well for this old wives tale.

However, it is April now, so either way we should be getting some rain now that Spring is in full swing.