Peter Cottontail

Peter Cottontail is a name temporarily assumed by a fictional rabbit named Peter Rabbit in the works of Thornton Burgess, an author from Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1910, when Burgess began his Old Mother West Wind series, the cast of animals included Peter Rabbit. Four years later, in The Adventures of Peter Cottontail, Peter Rabbit, unhappy at his plain-sounding name, briefly changed his name to Peter Cottontail because he felt it made him sound more important. He began putting on airs to live up to his important-sounding name, but after much teasing from his friends, soon returned to his original name, because, as he put it, "There's nothing like the old name after all." In the 26-chapter book, he takes on the new name partway through chapter 2, and returns to his "real" name, Peter Rabbit, at the end of chapter 3. Burgess continued to write about Peter Rabbit until his retirement in 1960, in over 15,000 daily syndicated newspaper stories, many of them featuring Peter Rabbit, and some of them later published as books, but "Peter Cottontail" is never mentioned again.

Harrison Cady, who illustrated Burgess' books, wrote and drew the syndicated Peter Rabbit comic strip from 1920 to 1948.

The 1971 Easter television special Here Comes Peter Cottontail was based on a 1957 novel by Priscilla and Otto Friedrich entitled The Easter Bunny That Overslept. The name is sometimes used as a euphemism or alternative to the term Easter Bunny.