Around Christmas, one sometimes hears of Christians who are in a huff because they feel that others have forgotten what they like to call "the reason for the season." People are paying too much attention to the Santa-presents-eggnog-mistletoe elements of the holiday, in other words, and overlooking the centrality of a certain birthday—as if humans around the world hadn't always held serious (and seriously hedonistic) parties on and around the winter solstice, as if the decision to graft Jesus's birth onto this traditionally festive season hadn't been the purest and canniest co-optation, and as if Christmas celebrations weren't even seen as all that Christian until relatively recently. (Christmas isn't mentioned once in the Bible, of course.)
One doesn't seem to hear the same complaints about Easter. Certainly you would think Christians might be even more sensitive about this holiday, given that the events it commemorates are central to Christian belief, so it would seem that contemporary Easter observances are not seen by believers as having jumped the rails in quite the same way as Christmas observances. Surely some believers must wish more people would find their way to church on Easter Sunday, but nonetheless a lot of Americans do—it's the day of highest church attendance in this country each year, after all—so if anything it is probably a reassuring occasion for those who trouble themselves over the state of other people's souls.
Could the relative lack of controversy around Easter have to do with its shifting date? Easter is pretty much the only widely celebrated "moveable feast," a holy day not observed on the same date or day each year. Instead, as you may know, Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox—or at least this used to be how the date was worked out. Then, because the shiftiness of the equinox made things too confusing, it was decided, by both Catholics and the Protestant "Christian Churches," to simply establish March 21 as the calculation's starting point, instead.
What this boils down to is that no one ever knows when Easter will occur. Well, that's an exaggeration. The date is of course printed in calendars each year, and I'm sure many Christians take careful note. And regular churchgoers have their attention drawn to it by the series of special dates and observances that lead up to it in a sort of countdown, including Lent, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week.
For the rest of us, however, the day has a tendency to sort of sneak up. Sometime in March, we start to sense its presence, out there on the horizon. Finally someone will decide to check the calendar, but even after the date has been verified and announced I tend to have difficulty keeping it in mind.
One result is that there is not and really cannot be an "Easter season" in spring the way that there is a "Christmas season" in December. Whether you go to church or not, you know on, say, December 1 how many days are left until Christmas, even if you do mainly think of them as "shopping days." Believers and nonbelievers alike are thus on or at least cannot help being aware of the same Christmas countdown clock, even those for whom the day utterly lacks religious significance. Not so for Easter. Only the believers know when "Easter season" starts; the rest of us must keep an eye out for PAAS egg-dye displays and the appearance of Reese's Peanut Butter Eggs in the grocery story checkout aisle.
So there is no springtide equivalent to those several weeks leading up to Christmas, when people party with only the most nominal nod to the religious elements of said season and sometimes even dare to say "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas." As a society, in other words, we don't pay attention to Easter for as long as we pay attention to Christmas. There is less time for bunglers to get Easter wrong and less time for the devout to notice if they do.
Another possibly pertinent difference is that here is also less commercialization of Easter. You can't say that Easter isn't commercialized, but it is much less so than Christmas. The main purpose of Christmas, one could forgive a Martian observer for concluding, is the exchange of presents, none of which need have the slightest connection to Jesus or his birthday. My impression is that most Easter-related purchases are, well, related to Easter, and besides there aren't so many of them. According to the National Retail Federation, Americans were on track this year to spend $21.6 billion "to celebrate the holiday." This sounds like a lot of money and is, in fact, the highest level of Easter spending on record, but, per NRF, it only works out to about $180 "per consumer." By contrast, NRF measured recent Christmas "winter holiday" spending at closer to $1,000 per consumer.
I'm sure the market looks at Easter as a holiday with room to grow, in other words. Free market dynamics, capitalism, and modern digital marketing being what they are, I am sure the door to celebrating Easter with profligate gift-giving swings ever wider open with each passing year, but I haven't personally noticed much of this sort of shift.
Easter retains the strongest religious flavor of any mainstream holiday celebrated in the west. Not only is it the day of highest church attendance in this country, as mentioned earlier, but even I once attended (i.e., was dragged by my parents to) an Easter service—one of only about a half dozen times I've been to church in my life. Nonetheless, Easter is also a holiday in which it feels especially easy to spot pre-Christian elements and origins. Just as Christmas was stapled onto the Roman Saturnalia and other traditional mid-winter feast days, Easter comes at a time of year when northern hemisphere peoples have always celebrated the return of the sun and prayed for abundance. Aside from church and pretty hats, the main elements of mainstream Easter celebrations can feel decidedly pagan: a mythical animal, pride of place for the egg, a ritualized search for food in the wilderness, etc.
Where does all of this come from? If you go poking around online, it is easy to find websites claiming that Easter was named after a pre-Christian West Germanic goddess named Eostre. The time of year we now call "April" was when Eostre was traditionally celebrated with feasts in her honor, and as a result the month bore her name in Old English: Ēosturmōnaþ in Northumbrian and Ēastermōnaþ in West Saxon. Therefore, this line of reasoning goes, what we call Easter is just an old pagan festival that those crafty Christians renamed, reconfigured, and insinuated themselves into, and many of the stranger associated customs were carried over from earlier traditions.
Except it turns out that the websites expressing the most certainty on this point tend to be explicitly "neo-pagan," less academic than advocative and therefore having what you might call a dog in the fight. Digging deeper, one finds that all of this Eostre stuff is based on just one source, the writings of an eighth-century monk known as the Venerable Bede. Bede seems to have taken a special interest in Easter, devoting not one but two books simply to the topic of fixing the holiday's date (a surprisingly controversial matter throughout the history of Christianity). It is in one of these books that we find Bede's notation that "Easter" was named for Eostre.
The Eostre story gained additional steam in 1835, when Jacob Grimm (yes, one of those Grimms) published his Deutsche Mythologie. In this book, Grimm asserts the existence of a pan-Germanic goddess named Ostara whose "sacred animal" was a hare and opines that the Eostre mentioned by Bede must have been a local variation. About 40 years later, in another book named Deutsche Mythologie, the author—Adolf Holtzmann—fluffs up the Ostara/hare connection by relating that this same Ostara is supposed to have once saved a bird with frozen wings by transforming it into a hare, which by the way retained the ability to lay eggs.
Holtzmann's telling at first seems well positioned to make sense of how Easter was being celebrated in Germany at the time. On the night before Easter Sunday, the custom among German children had long been to build "nests" where, on Easter morning, they hoped to find eggs laid by the Osterhase, or "Easter Hare." I'll note here that hares are distinct from rabbits and, unlike the latter, live in ground nests, not in underground warrens. This is a fact that seems as though it could indeed explain the origins of Easter baskets, which, with their beddings of plastic faux grass, are rather nestlike, now that it's mentioned.
As promising as all of this sounds as the origin story for at least some of the customs we now associate with Easter, there are problems. No one has yet found any earlier mention of Eostre than in Bede's book, meaning that the pagans who supposedly worshipped her never saw fit to create the slightest record of her, including even simply writing down her name. Similarly, no one wrote down anything about this Ostara character before Grimm. And Holtzmann's later elaboration of what at first glance seems as though it must be the Easter Bunny's creation myth turns out to have been somewhat ex post facto, given that the earliest recorded mention of the Osterhase came fully two hundred years before he published this story. It seems unlikely that the Ostara/bird/hare story could have been in circulation for two millennia or longer without anyone else ever having recorded the slightest reference thereto.
Could there be a simpler or, at any rate, an entirely different explanation? The name "Eostre" is etymologically connected to Old English words for "east," the direction where the sun rises and thus a natural focal point during a season when northern hemisphere humans have since time immemorial tended to be especially focused on the "return" of the sun. Couldn't Ēosturmōnaþ or Ēastermōnaþ simply mean "the month when we look east"? Bede wouldn't have been the first monk to simply make things up or, more charitably, completely misunderstand the locals, and neither of the Grimms were known for what we would today recognize as academic rigor.
"Some religions think the egg is the symbol of the soul," said Lucifer (or rather "Louis Cipher," as portrayed by Robert de Niro in the movie Angel Heart), just before taking a bite of one. "The egg, symbol of life," rapped the Beastie Boys, in their late-1980s ode to "drive-by eggings, plaguing L.A." Certainly pagans and Christians alike have paid a lot of attention to the egg, not only because it is an excellent foodstuff (for my part, I usually have at least four a day) but because it also possess such rich allegorical potential. Why are eggs a symbol of life? They're not, actually—they are life and so could not fit better into both pagan fertility rituals and observances around a Christian holiday in which the topics of life, death, and rebirth are central.
It is easy to imagine pagan fertility rituals also taking note of hares, given their prodigious reproduction abilities. Then, when you find out that hares can conceive a new litter while pregnant with a previous one, you can see why Christians might have seen a connection between these animals and certain of their own beliefs.
It is incontrovertible, at any rate, that pre-Christians long celebrated this season, but I suppose it is less clear what elements of our modern Easter observances come from them and which are more recent.
Axl has left behind belief in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. The state of Belle's belief is more nebulous and seems to have something in common with what Coleridge called "poetic faith," which is related to what he also called "the willing suspension of disbelief" that is necessary for the enjoyment of art and, most likely, religion itself.
She does not seem, in other words, to subject the concept of the Easter Bunny (or Santa Claus, or the Tooth Fairy) to the coldly rational sort of analysis she is capable of bringing to bear on other important questions, such as whether her brother's Easter basket has more candy in it than hers. Believers look for reasons to believe, not reasons to doubt, and the true believer doesn't need many of the former to counterbalance just about any amount of the latter.
Here are the current Easter customs in the Oakes household. On Easter Eve, the children set out their baskets, much as they might hang their stockings with care on the night before Christmas. During the night, the Easter Bunny flits in somehow, fills the baskets with a selection of candy—interestingly, candy that is no different from what one sees in any supermarket this time of year, suggesting that this magical creature buys in bulk from Walmart—then hides the baskets somewhere in the house, usually leaving a sequential trail of runic clues on little slips of paper.
The first phase of Easter morning—the hunt for the hidden baskets, and then a little gorging on the baskets' contents—takes place at our house. Then, around mid-morning, we have always shifted to my parents' house for Phase II: a hunt for plastic eggs filled with candy, money, and baubles. It is understood even by Belle that these eggs are filled and hidden by human hands, not bunny paws. I can't remember if we ever asserted otherwise, but—if so—it's been years since this component of the story felt worth maintaining in the face of its various logistical challenges and potential failure points (i.e., the need to get empty eggs to my mother for filling, the fact that I go over on Sunday morning to help with the hiding, etc.).
The Martian observer I mentioned earlier might be struck by the common thread of hiding and searching in all of this, and I find I'm at a loss to explain it. History records that the men of Martin Luther's congregation hid (presumably real) eggs for the women and children to find—but why? Could this have pagan roots as well, a reference to the fact that, with spring's warmer temperatures and riot of growth, it was once again possible to forage successfully? Or were they reenacting something like what Mary Magdalene must have done or felt like doing when she found Jesus missing from his tomb? Would the eggs themselves be Jesus, and if so what is all this candy doing inside him?
I do not now remember if my family held our own Easter egg hunts when I was little (if so: sorry, Mom, I'm sure they were great!), but I do remember attending at least one public egg hunt, sometime during late elementary school or early middle school. I hesitate to call it a "hunt," as the eggs were not hidden but were instead strewn in plain sight all over a soccer field. My little brother and I, along with what I remember as hundreds of other children, ranged ourselves along the sidelines. Then, at the sound of some sort of whistle or starting gun, we raced to grab as many of the eggs as we could. Speaking of empty tombs, my main memory from this event is the shock I experienced at more than once bending to pick up an egg only to have it snatched away by a more aggressive child. I hope I helped my little brother find some eggs but the likeliest story is that I left him to sink or swim on his own as it dawned on me that all was fair not only in love and war but also jelly beans.
Easter was one of the first major events disrupted by the pandemic last year. We hunted for eggs outside as usual but skipped our traditional Phase III, a booze-soaked brunch hosted by my parents. But as you may have heard, Dr. Fauci recently announced that it's supposed to be reasonably safe for vaccinated grandparents to host vaccinated children and unvaccinated grandchildren for an indoors visit, so, this year, we gathered as a family around my parents' table once more.
The ham took forever to heat up and we shattered one champagne flute. Nonetheless, it really did feel like a rock had been rolled away and we were stepping through into a season of hope and warmth.
