Easter is (as most people reading this know) the Christian holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus on the third day after his crucifixion.
It is the holiest day of the Christian liturgical calendar, and a day when most Christians, even those who normally eschew church-going, attend service. A lot of Americans are what we jokingly call “holly-lily” churchgoers … going to church at Christmas when there is holly decorating the nave and at Easter when there are lilies at the altar.
Celebrating the resurrection of Jesus – called Pascha — was initially inextricable from the Jewish feast of Passover, which Christ himself was celebrating in Jerusalem before his crucifixion. The Romans, already nervous due to the massive influx of Jewish citizens into the capital for Passover, were anxious that the miracles Jesus was purportedly performing would spark a Jewish revolt against their overlords. The Romans, as well as the puppet ethnarch and tetrarchs who served as Rome’s figureheads in the Levant, were itching to do away with a potential rebel leader. Racists have often used the idea that the Pharisees were the ones who ordered Christ’s death as an excuse for antisemitism, but the truth of the matter is that the Jewish priests were acting more out of desperation to keep a Roman pogrom from falling on their heads rather than from malice against the rabbi from Galilee. The Roman state, not the Jewish providence of Judea, was responsible for executing Jesus … and before you judge the Jewish priests who went along with Rome’s demands too harshly, think about what you would do to keep your children from being crucified as ‘zealot sympathizers‘ by Romans.
Early Christians, who were mostly Jewish, continued to mark the death and resurrection of Jesus during Passover, but as the new religion spread like wildfire into the gentile communities, a way had to be formulated to let the non-Jewish worshippers outside Rome when to celebrate Pascha as well. In roughly 260 AD St Dionysius of Alexandria referred to the fasting days observed around Pascha, and the Apostolical Constitutions of the 4th century pretty much solidified the canonical practice of Paschal Holy Week. Commemoration of Christ’s resurrection was set as a movable feast, celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, and that is how the date of is still determined by Western Christianity in the present day.
So how did Pascha become know as ‘Easter’ in English speaking countries?
There is a persistent myth that Ishtar is the goddess behind present-day Easter celebrations, but that is incorrect. We get the name “Easter” from Eostre (also spelled Ostara), a Germanic and Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess symbolized by eggs, flowers, and the rapidly reproducing rabbit. The pagans of Northern Europe and the British isles liked their spring festival for Eostre, and they didn’t want to give up the fun when they converted to Christianity. Thus, they kept the Eostre holiday and much of its trappings, but changed the reason for celebrating. The celebration of Pascha first overlapped, then supplanted, Eostre festivals, leaving the name Easter, eggs, and bunnies permanently grafted on to the Christian holiday.
Some protestant denominations see the left-over Eostre symbolism as a reason to eschew Easter baskets and refuse to hunt for Easter eggs, but that isn’t really rational. Easter has been celebrated as the resurrection of Jesus for the last 13 centuries. Saint Bede wrote in 8th-century work The Reckoning of Time that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent of April), pagan Anglo-Saxons had held feasts in Eostre’s honor, but that this tradition had died out by his lifetime, wholly replaced by the Christian celebration of Pascha. Surely Easter is a “traditional” Christian holiday after more than a millennia of being practiced as such?
The Puritans would have disagreed with me – at kniefpoint. When they controlled England they managed to suck nearly every iota of pleasure out of Christian worship, and Easter was not spared the ravages of those killjoys. In fact, there are still some modern day “Puritans” who positively seethe at the thought of Christians celebrating such a pagan holiday:
If you want to be a Papist, then call yourself a Papist, or a Druid, or a Grecian worshipper of the devil. Don’t call yourself Christian by upholding a blatantly obvious demonic holy-day that God abhors. When you partake of such wicked schemes, God’s anger is aroused, and He states in Deuteronomy 32:17, “They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known.” When you give your child their Easter basket, recall God’s words, and heed the Psalmist in Psalm 106:37,“They sacrificed their sons and their daughters to the demons.” Know that you serve the same blasphemies that Romanism has brought into Christendom, and that the Scriptures rightly warns the covenant people of God that they should abstain from such things and be separate.
While I have to admit that if children eat a whole, big bunch of candy from their Easter Baskets it CAN bring out some demonic behaviors in them, Easter is now as much Christian as it is pagan – maybe even more so due to Christian cultural hegemony. However, whether one is Christian or neopagan, Easter is still a time to think about the hope of life after death, the continuation of life, and the emergence of spring warmth. The rejoicing in rebirth between the two religions does not have to be antagonistic.
Nonetheless, some things are not holy and never will be – like Peeps. I suspect those sugary little bastards are the work of Satan, and can trust no one who consumes them knowingly.