Easter

[cosmolinguist]

Easter was probably my favorite holiday when I was a kid.

I grew up Catholic, which meant I hated Lent. I don't like seafood. I remember liking it when I was very little, and I swear it was the years of compulsory Friday-fish-eating that made me dislike it. I think I just associated it with a dietary restriction I did not want or like. (Only when I was a little older did I realize that I actually should be glad I grew up post-Vatican-II, or otherwise every Friday would've been like that.) Also, as Dad reminded me yesterday, you're supposed to "fast"—no snacks, and not a whole lot at meals either—on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. I'm so glad I'm not Catholic any more...

But what I really hated about Lent wasn't the fish or the lack of snacks. It was the whole Giving Up Stuff. My dad always gives up candy for Lent. So when my brother and I were little, we did too. It wasn't our idea. I soon realized that not being allowed to eat candy for a month and a half of every year against one's own will sounded suspiciously like punishment. So Easter meant I could finally dig in to those Cadbury creme eggs my mom loves so much (I ate them as a kid, though now I can feel insulin shock coming on if I even touch one), the chocolate bunnies (either solid or hollow), the pastel M&Ms, who wouldn't like this? I never was a fan of the canonical jellybeans, but I did love my chocolate.

I loved Easter because it meant that I could eat whatever I wanted again.

I don't remember Dad being disappointed when my brother and I got all excited about this. He tried to tell us the holiday was about Jesus and not about chocolate eggs (an unusual display of religious fervor, for him). I don't remember it making much of an impression on me.

I liked Easter anyway. I liked the fancy dresses (Mom even got me Easter dresses that came with hats, when I was little). I liked the Easter lilies in church. I loved the music—after all that phenomenally dreary "These Forty Days of Lent O Lord" stuff, it was great to be singing all those alleluias. I liked my mom's church especially, where they actually sing more than two verses of the songs and have trumpet players.

When I was a teenager the candy stopped being such an issue (other kids want alcohol or marijuana by that age, but I was happy with an illicit bag of Reese's pieces) but I still liked Easter becaue it's rather central to the Christianity of which I was fond then. Sure, Christmas is nice, Jesus has a birthday, wahoo. But everybody has birthdays. Not everybody gets rebirthdays.

Now the thing I like most about Easter is that it's so obviously barely Christian at all. The very date of Easter changes all the time because it's dependent on the date of Passover, and that changes because the Jewish calendar is lunar. A Jesus holiday is dependent on an equinox and the moon. The pagan equinox, the mysterious, sexy moon ... it delights my little heathen heart.

Besides, the idea of someone really cool returning from the dead is hardly new or unique to Christianity.

And the name Easter comes from Eostre. I was reading about her yesterday. She's a goddess of spring, new life, fertility, and all that. She has other names in various cultures: she's Astarte to the Phonecians (which is odd; I'm just reading about Astarte in a great Tom Robbins book called Skinny Legs and All), Demeter to the Greeks, Ishtar to the Babylonians, Kali to the Indians. Eostre's a Saxon goddess. Spring's return must've been a big deal there, when the winters were so long and cold and had no central heating or microfleece or anything else we use to get by.

I read that the Saxon—or maybe the Anglo-Saxon?—calendar was basically divided into only two seasons, summer and winter, with spring and fall as minor offshoots of those.* Eostre's festival was celebrated around this time of year, at the beginning of summer, in a month called Eostremonath. Guess what that means.

Maybe this train of thought is why I'm so amazed that people actually celebrate Easter. This is a real holiday? People get time off for this? And they don't laugh at it or anything?

---

* That sounds like the calendar we should have in Minnesota! I thought. I've been saying this for years; there's only a week or two of spring and fall, with about five months of summer and the other six winter. Like Anglo-Saxon England, my state is full of Norse and Germanic people, and we all seem to have the same kind of weather.

Comments

[millabates.livejournal.com]

When I was growing up - and I must admit, still now - I would not eat fish because when I was 4 a fish bone got stuck in my throat and my dad had to pull it out with tweezers.

I too marvel at Easter and how it is such a pagan/religious holiday mix.

[cosmolinguist]

It seems fish is a source of many traumatic childhood experiences! Yours moreso than mine, though, definitely.

[angel-thane.livejournal.com]

(Only when I was a little older did I realize that I actually should be glad I grew up post-Vatican-II, or otherwise every Friday would've been like that.)

I didn't realize it wasn't like that anymore - I just assumed that most people didn't really stick by it.

[cosmolinguist]

My dad raised us as fairly strict Catholics, mostly due to the influence of his own parents. But it's common around here for, say, restaurants—even fast-food ones—to flaunt their great deals on fish and other seafood this time of year. And our school lunches were always Catholic-meat-free on Fridays during Lent.

[angel-thane.livejournal.com]

YEah, See, my cathlic school friends had fish on fridays at the cafeteria year round. I just assumed tehat's how it was everywhere.