Tips of The Season

The family that I grew up in was never very big on formality. Typically, we would send out one card every year at Christmas. We would never send out birthday greeting cards or easter greeting cards, And would only remember each others’ birthdays about half the time. Don’t get me wrong, we really love each other. It was just that we were sort of an absent-minded bunch of people, and none of us liked ritual very much. Christmas holiday greeting cards were about as far as we went.

Occasionally, we would have a Christmas tree. We would never bother with Easter decorations, Easter eggs, or any of the rest of it.

Then I met my current girlfriend and we moved in together. She is much different than I am in almost every way. Not only did her family shoot an Easter greeting card every spring and send it out to everyone they knew, but they also had one of the most elaborate Easter parties on the block.

They would have chicken, rabbit, egg salad, and a bunch of other ceremonial foods that went along with the season. She showed me some of their old Easter greeting cards, and they were spectacular. They really went all out to design a card that was personal, yet funny and lighthearted. Although she said we didn’t have to, it made me want to send out Easter greeting cards of our own. It was a lot of work to get them just right, but I’m glad that we did it.

At first, we wanted to send out ecard greeting cards, but then we thought better of it. Although it seems a little quaint to some people in our circle of friends, everyone loves to get a personalized Easter greeting card with a handwritten note. People who have never had Easter greeting cards before like it even more because it is something new and special. The problem was that we were so used to using e-mail for everything that we did not have many of our friends addresses. Before we could even send out those Easter greeting cards, we had to make dozens of phone calls and e-mails. Then we had to film a picture of us for the Easter cards and send them out After including a special, personalized message on each one.

I didn’t think that Easter greeting cards would take so much time, but they really did.

Many enjoy the annual Easter holiday in our various ways, but if you take a moment to reflect on what Easter is about you can be excused for quickly becoming confused.

Easter is mainly a Christian religious festival, celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus Christ after he died on the Cross. For many Christians, Easter is the most important time in their year, because it deals with matters that lie at the very heart of their faith.

So what has that got to do with Easter bunnies? Hiding eggs? Chocolate Candy?

To add to the confusion, have you ever tried to plan an Easter holiday away, only to discover it is celebrated at a different time this year from the date it was held last year? Easter Sunday computations can see it fall anywhere between March 22 and April 25. It falls on March 23 in 2008, making this year’s celebrations an exceptionally early Easter. It will next fall on the 23rd in 2160 and on the 22nd in 2285.

The Christian Easter festivities owe much, including the date they are celebrated, to the earlier Jewish Passover festivities, which are based on the Hebrew lunisolar calendar. The complications come from the translation of dates based on the cycles of the moon and the sun to our Gregorian calendar.

For many, Easter is also a time to celebrate the new life and renewal of growth that is associated with Spring. This idea is part of a more recent move to secularize the holiday, including suggestions to rename Easter as Spring Holiday. But what if you live in the Southern Hemisphere where Easter is celebrated as leaves fall and Winter approaches?

Other regional oddities associated with Easter can also be confusing to travelers. In parts of Eastern Europe you might encounter an Easter tradition of men splashing women with water, and giving them a symbolic whipping. In parts of Scandinavia, Easter resembles Halloween, with children dressed as witches going from door to door exchanging candy for decorated branches of sprouting pussy willow.

Such traditions, and the link between Easter and Spring, are unrelated to Christian traditions. They owe more to the older pagan celebration of the end of a long hard winter and the beginnings of renewed growth and new life. This tradition is symbolized by the giving of Easter eggs, which still remains extremely popular, especially in today’s popular commercialized form of the chocolate Easter egg.

The idea of the Easter Bunny is believed to have descended from a pagan association between Easter and the sight of male hares facing off in the fields as part of their Spring mating rituals, which also gave rise to the common saying, “mad as a March hare”. The Easter hare, along with the Easter egg, became a symbol of fertility and new life at Springtime. Somewhere along the way someone must have decided cute little bunnies were more commercially appealing than cavorting hares.

Confusing though this mix of traditions may seem, we all choose how to celebrate Easter in our own way, as a holiday with its origins merged from many cultures and from long, long ago.