SOUTH PORTLAND – Move over, Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny is making tracks on your turf, using one of the biggest Christian holidays as an opportunity to lure little tykes and their parents to the mall.

For many children, Christmas would not be complete without a visit on Santa’s knee. Now the Easter Bunny is hopping down the same trail, selling Easter and the advent of spring with colorful eggs and a flower village.

About 80 or 90 percent of malls that stock Santa during the holiday season now are offering the Easter Bunny for at least two weeks before Easter.

For some it’s the crass commercialization of a day set aside to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But for many parents, it’s just springtime fun and magic for kids. For the malls, it’s good business.

The big bunny is another way for malls to lure customers, said Bonnie Fluck, spokeswoman for Cherry Hill Photo Enterprises in New Jersey, which provides Santas and bunnies for more than 230 malls across the country.

“It’s not really the same draw as Santa,” she admits.

Nonetheless, more parents seem to be making special trips to shopping centers to line up with their toddlers in hopes that they’ll mug for the camera with the big bunny with a white tail and pink ears.

Peggy MacLeod of Newfield repeatedly pushed her 2-year-old daughter, Casey Monahan, toward the bunny at the Maine Mall, hoping to get a photo. But little Casey, like many other toddlers, protested.

“Noooooo! I don’t like the bunny,” she cried.

“I’m more excited to have a picture with the bunny than she is,” MacLeod admitted, leaving empty-handed.

The Easter Bunny waves and sits in a festive spring village, but it’s not the same as seeing Santa. There is no cheery “Easter music” or bustling shoppers. And the bunny is quiet compared to Santa’s “Ho ho ho!”

“Typically, the Easter Bunny really can’t talk. Have you ever seen a talking bunny?” said Rick Eggesiecker from St. Louis-based SantaPlus, the other big company that provides Santas and bunnies to malls across the country. “It’s more animation and being very energized. It’s a different type of approach. There’s a lot of shaking your bunny tail.”

Like Santa, a good bunny is hard to find.

It’s easier in that the bunny doesn’t have to fit a certain description like Santa – a jolly old man with a white beard and hearty laugh. But the costume is hot and cumbersome and definitely not for everyone.

“The Easter Bunny costume is very difficult to wear. You can’t see that well and you need to be escorted,” said Fluck of Cherry Hill Photo. “They get very hot and you can’t stay in that costume as long.”

Parents eager for the memento of their children with the bunny pay anywhere from $9 to $35 for photo packages provided by the same companies that supply the Santas and bunnies.

For Amber Carr, it’s worth it to see her daughter so happy.

“She loves seeing Santa and the Easter Bunny,” she said as her daughter smiled sitting in the bunny’s lap. Four-year-old Anastasia even wrote a letter to the Easter Bunny asking for gifts and treats, just like Santa.

On Easter Sunday, Anastasia will get a basket and a present, but she won’t be going to church.

“It’s too complicated,” said Carr of Randolph. She and her husband grew up with different religious backgrounds so they’ve decided to participate in neither church, she explained.

For Dr. Daniel Akin, dean of theology at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Ky., the mall bunny is just one more example of the commercial exploitation of Christianity.

“When Easter is reduced to nothing more than a bunny, Easter eggs and chocolate, we have reached a tragic day because that is not what Easter was about to begin with and it’s not what it should be about today,” he said. Paul Lim, professor of theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass., agreed. He called the Easter Bunny a lot of “fluff and no substance.”

But the Rev. Eric Shafer, director of the Evangelican Lutheran Church in America, sees the Easter Bunny as an opportunity to spread the Christian word, like a good ad campaign.

“Many churches have Easter egg hunts,” he said from Chicago. “The real question is do you complain what secular society has done with religious symbols or do you use it as an opportunity. I say the latter.”