Easter Comes On Sunday
/If you're looking for Easter, you will always find it on Sunday.
The trick is figuring which Sunday. That's when the hunt begins.
Easter Is A Wandering Celebration
You undoubtedly noticed that Easter wanders around the calendar. You have to check each year as to when you'll need to have your Easter bonnet purchased.
Easter can be celebrated as early as the end of March or in the last half of April. The Easter holiday schedule from now until 2050 shows Easter as early as March 25 and as late as April 25. That's a lot of wandering.
Easter is a moveable feast. It evokes something magical even though it has a scientific basis in the timing of lunar cycles.
“The date of Easter is determined according to the lunar calendar (the date of Christmas is fixed on the solar calendar on 25 December).
Before 325 AD, there was no official celebration of the birth of Christ, and Easter was celebrated by some Christians on Passover (a lunar holiday) and by others the following Sunday.
The First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD established that Easter would fall on the Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal (spring) equinox.
The church’s methods are a bit imprecise, in part because the vernal equinox doesn’t always fall on March 21 and in part because the church uses traditional tables (rather than modern astronomy) to determine the dates of full moons.”
Combine The Old And New
We expand our knowledge of the moon and Easter as well as spring and its new beginnings. The connections extend deep within our history and link back to festivals that existed long before the religion of Christianity.
Bunnies are a leftover from the pagan festival of Eostre, a Germanic goddess whose symbol was a rabbit or hare.
The exchange of eggs is an ancient custom representing rebirth and one can easily see the new beginning that spring represents. In Persia, eggs have been painted for thousands of years as part of the spring celebration of No Ruz, which is the Zoroastrian new year.
Hot Cross Buns
Easter has an ancient lineage and hot cross buns harken back to that history. Their delightful story reminds us of the adage: "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."
In the Old Testament, the Israelites baked sweet buns for an idol, and religious leaders tried to put a stop to it. The early church clergy also tried to stop sacred cakes being baked at Easter. Ultimately, in the face of defiant cake-baking pagan women, they gave up and blessed the cake instead. Hence, we benefit today from tasty hot cross buns.
A Moveable Feast
I have always loved the notion of a moveable feast. Partly because it's intriguing to be kept guessing each year, and partly because of the book by that name, written by Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway recounts his life in Paris as a young man during the 1920s and describes it in this well-known quote:
“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”
I passed though my Hemingway phase during my first years in college. Our youth whispered that we were immortal. There were times when reading his books, I would almost feel tipsy, caused by living vicariously as he quaffed vast amounts of clear, crisp white wine or imbibed in bar-drinks that had to be clean.
We dreamed everything was still possible:
“...we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright.”
And while we are a bit older and wiser now – spring equinox, Easter, rebirth and moveable feasts are still a part of our celebrations.
