Is Easter the Worst?
Biggest Christian Holiday isn't that fun
Easter is kind of the worst.
Which is strange because it’s the holiest day of the year, celebrating the victory of Jesus over death. The party should be bigger.
First reason: Jesus is our main guy. We should be pretty pumped that he’s alive. If the people I have known and loved and lost were no longer dead, that would be a big occasion. Isn’t Jesus the number one guy?
Second reason: not only is this the holiday where our -reportedly- best friend is alive, but apparently also Death is no longer a problem for those who believe in him and we don’t have to be afraid of dying anymore?
“Death Lost” Day feels like it should be a lot crazier of a party.
Easter doesn’t have much to do aside from Church, Brunch, and maybe an Easter Egg hunt with the most controversial holiday candy.1 I happen to like Easter. My main problem with Easter Egg hunts is that I don’t get invited to do them much.
But Easter isn’t that great, over too quick, and just a blip of a celebration after forty long days of giving something up for Lent.
If it were truly Nobody Has to be Afraid of Death Day, I’d expect
Parades with marching bands and floats
Festivals
Rides
Fireworks
Contests
Gift-giving
Songs
Dressing up
Plays
Movies
And all the other ways we celebrate holidays.
Easter isn’t not fun because it evaded secularization like Christmas. And Christmas isn’t secularized because we insist on pageantry. Festivals, games, songs, movies, dressing up, feasts and more are how we celebrate holidays, whose very name comes from Holy Days.
Easter is lame it’s because we are not the best2 at celebrating it: Church and Brunch.3
We get closest to proper celebration with the All-Night Party that follows the Easter Vigil Mass, the most gigantic, packed mass of the year on Saturday night, celebrating Easter4 and welcoming in new Converts.
Mass ends at like 11:30 PM and then, you party.
Drinks, sweets, smoking, dancing.... It’s perfect: enjoying all the things you gave up for the past forty (forty-six) days.
But not everyone does it. And not all the parties are as partyish as something so awesome as Easter deserves.
Lent makes sense
Easter is boring, coming and going, and you can’t party because we all have work tomorrow.5
Easter faces the same problem that a lot of holidays have: they are “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden,/ Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be/ Ere one can say “It lightens.””
The second I’m well and properly coming around to feel the spirit of a holiday it’s over! The second I get a really great idea on what to do to celebrate a holiday, I am looking down the long end of a 365 day stretch until I can implement it. It’s one reason Christmas rocks: Christmas Eve and Day- two days, one holiday.
Easter as one day? Too small, much too small to celebrate No Need for Existential Dread Day.
Lent makes sense: Lent is a season.
Lent is something that even non-Christians do. Why would that be? If I were to save some tradition from a religion I no longer believed, it might be the twelve-night party from Christmas to Epiphany (did you know they even did that?) that they used to do in the Middle Ages.6
Instead people save the suffering.
Lent makes sense- it feels spiritual: give something worldly up; remember your death; ashes; humility; penance. These are spiritual things.
But of course that makes sense: everyone does it.
Literally everyone knows or senses that giving things up is good for you and feels vaguely religious in nature.
We all do these even in the nonreligious spheres of our lives.7 No one has ever set down and told themselves “I am sad about my life and what’s going on in it. To remedy my sad state I will start eating ice cream every night after dinner- yes with hot fudge and bananas, and candy and all the works, just really doing it up. Yes, I believe an extra eight hundred calories a day is how I will turn my life around.”
Even if it’s in the name of a diet, thousands of people believe fasting will get them closer to happiness.
Everyone knows, or suspects, you suffer your way to happiness, you suffer your way to success.
Solemnities
But there are- did you know- certain days during Lent called Solemnities.8
We might like the sound of that. Solemnities: they are solemn occasions. Good religion ought to be solemn, serious even.
Except the most solemn and serious things, the most important things in our life are usually happy, like weddings. We’ve gotten it into our heads that solemn means the opposite of how the Church does: a Solemnity is the highest Feast. Christmas and Easter are Solemnities.
On Solemnities in Lent you are specifically supposed to not fast. You are supposed to feast.
It feels like you’re cheating. Like you’re breaking a rule. You might be scared to do it. It this alright? Is this okay? Maybe you won’t want to: you’re on a good streak anyway. How much you want it shows how addicted you are. You’ve done so well giving it up and now enjoying it throws that all away…
When you want to celebrate something, you just do. It’s spontaneous and sincere, like how people in love talk without thinking. When it’s an order, “Thou shalt feast,” it might make you inevitably ask “How?”9
There’s a natural and obvious answer: celebrate how you would normally celebrate anything. But notice the reaction to the Solemnity order to feast: it throws into terrible contrast the fact that God overcame the world, indeed came to redeem it, and in celebrating this fact we don’t seem too eager to engage with anything in the world. I don’t know if Jesus noticed, but we just spent almost fifty days avoiding that stuff: why on Earth would we engage with it again?
Underneath all of our apprehension of celebration is the sneaking suspicion that maybe God wasn’t serious when he said that the world is good and filled with good things.
To be fair to us, we’re incredibly suspicious because most of the time we don’t enjoy something because we have too much of it. As G.K. Chesterton said “…we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” Temperance, like humility, leads to enjoyment, and most of our pleasures are ruined by overindulgence. But we can swing so far back that we sin by not enjoying things enough rather than enjoying them too much: this is just as much a perversion, though a less popular one.10
The Devil doesn’t just want to damn us, he wants us to be damn miserable while it happens. He doesn’t just want to kill our souls, he wants to be a buzzkill (which essentially have the same effect.)
Celebration is inconvenient
When life is dull, monotonous, and in a desperate want of a change, as we sit on a couch feeling bored and fat, we’d often like those changes to be catastrophically difficult: I will wake up early, and run vast distances. I will write my novel, and clean my room. I will do one hundred sit-ups and only eat celery.11
But suppose in sitting on that couch someone were to bust in and tell you to put on your best clothes, stretch, and wake up: a fantastic party has erupted and we need to start celebrating at that very minute. In theory we’d be on board, but when offered countless times throughout the year, we are too tired, too busy. Even minor things, just by virtue of being tired, or it being a Tuesday, will end in cancelling plans. There is nothing people love more than cancelling plans.
It’s not for nothing then, that I suspect God made required pilgrimages for the Israelites, You have to Feast, much like how he has Holy Days of Obligation, You have to remember this is a super special day, because our temptation is to dullness or fasting, seldom to feasting.
It’s not impossible to understand: celebrating is a huge and terrible inconvenience. It’s why the hardest commandment is to not work on the Lord’s Day. Of all the sins to commit, insisting on working is a pretty terrible one. There are much more fun sins to do than work on Sunday. Go do some coveting, or steal something.12
When the God who made the Universe says ‘Take one out of seven days to relax, come visit me, have breakfast with your family, have some fun, slow day, watch a movie, relax, etc. just refrain from work”
We cry aloud with shaking fist “What a cruel and terrible God we have who does not know that I have laundry I have to do. God places the heaviest burdens on the backs of his people, not caring that a big project is due this week and my PowerPoint presentation really needs fine tuning.”
How to Celebrate?
I once knew a man whose life motto was die before you die. It sounded all well and good, pretty Christian even, until I realized that was the end goal: just being dead. Christians might sometimes make that mistake as well. Only, God says give away so you can have more, die so you can live. Fast so you can feast.
So we have to celebrate.
But how?
How?
How?
What an insane question. How do you celebrate? By having a fun time! Celebrate with food, gifts; with material things, and kissing and singing and dancing and all the earthly, animal-like, bodily things.
But that all scares the Puritanical ghost in us. Instead of celebrating it might suit us well to first split hairs wondering if an activity is enjoyment or entertainment (there is, you know, a gulf between the two so vast that nobody can cross from one side or another) or enjoyment and distraction, as if enjoyable things wouldn’t take your attention.
By the time Christians have finished debating the virtue of their play, play time is over. No wonder we don’t do it too much: it’s exhausting.
Some people love the rules of a board game, but it gives me glassy eyes and a strong desire to something more fun.
We know how to celebrate, it’s by doing what we desire. We’re not only supposed to be drawn to God by our wills but by desire. A real enjoyment of him.
Like how Christians enjoy making a distinction between happiness and joy, we like to make a distinction between love as a feeling and love as willing the good of the other. The only problem is this overemphasizes the “willing the good” part so much so that God doesn’t feel like he really has any kind, affection, or enjoyable feelings by my estimation.
I certainly don’t enjoy anything when all talk of love is about what you’re willing. It’s good to emphasize specifically for when you don’t like someone. But this is a holiday from love. Primarily, one of the things I love a lot about people and things that I love is that I love them. I love spending time with them, and doing things together, and having fun together.
And on Easter, a day when Love is apparently so strong that it exists forever and we get to now exist in Love with Love for forever, we wrap things up by 3 PM and call it a day to get ready for work.
Celebration is too hard, too tempting, too wrong. The things of this world are bad, or distractions, or addictions. We’ve tried so hard to be good, to be spiritual, that we got Lent all over Easter.
Jesus came and chided the pharisees, and we got only half the message. We hear the dirge and know how to mourn, but we hear the pipe and still refuse to dance.
Easter actually is a season: do something for it
Easter - Death is Dead Day- should be more than one day and in fact it is.
Easter goes on for eight more days, from Sunday to Sunday. And then it actually goes on for forty more days. In fact, Easter runs as a season, just as much as a stretch of time as Lent, up until Pentecost (Pente- means Fifty, because it’s fifty days after Easter.)
But who is going to still be partying the next Saturday, let alone the next day?
And Easter is a season, even though we don’t act like it.
People will stick to their Lenten disciplines, even fear to break them for dread of sin (it isn’t) or dread of the thing itself. What if we had Easter celebrations until Pentecost- something we did everyday to celebrate?
What if the imposition to celebrate Jesus rising from the dead lasted for more than a morning? What if the Easter season felt different from the rest of the year in the same way the season of Lent feels different, but in feasting and not fasting.
Buy yourself an unprompted gift, put on some extra calories, deliberately don’t work (hardest commandment) play more, don’t work at home, watch more movies with friends, have a designated party night of the week, sleep in on weekend, etc.
You might find this a harder thing to do: you might face accusations from without and within yourself: lazy, greedy, materialistic, glutton. You’d be in good company: the same accusations were leveled against Jesus.
Joy
Joy is tricky- mostly because most of us don’t super know what it is. We know enough to say it’s different than happiness (but in making the distinction really try to make their joy superior to happiness, and ultimately less fun.)13
The most fun thing about joy is trying to prove to everyone else that you have it. The second most fun thing about joy is that you get it mostly by believing you are right and other people are wrong. Easter’s greatest tradition might just be grumbling about how much other people don’t know what an important and holy day it is.14 Super fun. So fun we might pause to notice we’re not really having any fun, none that would certainly make anyone think we have anything to celebrate.15
Like the knowledge that our, reportedly, favorite person in the world actually isn’t dead.
Or like having the knowledge that we won’t have to die.
I imagine onlookers that see the response to Easter, a celebration too little, a joy so small, that they must continue on and wonder, is Easter the worst?
Rather, it the the very best. We best act like it.
Editorial: I do think Jelly Beans and Peeps beat out Candy Canes and Candy Corn in ‘Which holiday candy is the most controversial?’
Whenever painting with a broad brush it’s important to read the entire brush with the subtext that we’re kind of strawmanning. The task at hand isn’t to target one specific group, but rather ask ‘Of this perspective, given in the most extreme form, what trace elements of it do I find within myself that are on a spectrum trending towards this kind of extremism?”
Otherwise we all give ourselves the pass to act how we want because we’re not as bad as Hitler.
When we do this, we make a bad group the only bad people, rather than letting them stand as a warning to any and all that trend towards what they represent. While reading, what suspicions of the material do you find in yourself, what distrust of celebration, what puzzlement over joy, what proclivity to sorrow over joy? Those small things are more effective and pernicious than any person that might in some way be represented by the image given here.
But in an essay you have to use strong language.
Brunch: one of the best meals invented. Not the best meal for a holiday.
Days liturgically begin at 4 PM the previous day (Jewish days begin with all of night, and end with all of day, lent into Easter, death into life, darkness into light, it all makes sense.)
Except people on Spring Break. But they’re partying because partying is fun.
It’s where the Shakespeare Comedy Twelfth Night gets it’s name. It’s also the 12 Days of Christmas.
To be fair, if I were to try and save the twelve day party, that would be brutal. Twelve straight days of partying would be very, very hard to do. That’s probably why everyone just sort of sits on their couch in sweatpants for that duration of time nowadays.
Which, arguably, don’t actually exist, but whatever.
They exist all throughout the year too, but the juxtaposition in Lent is especially helpful: one day you are told to fast, the next day you are called to feast. Both with equal necessity to obedience.
This happened. God freed the Israelites and then told them they had to have a couple of Feasts every year and then said “Here’s how you do it.” When you’re told you must party, it can be a little jarring and confusing. What do you do?
Many people don’t come to a party not because they weren’t invited but because they’d rather pout. They prefer their sorrow to joy, their pride to celebration.
It’s not really strange, discipline, maturation, taking care of yourself, accomplishing goals and being competent do make you happy.
This is not a formal endorsement of sinning. Don’t covet, don’t steal.
As if joy wouldn’t include some measure of happiness. It’s like saying ‘Actually there is a difference between the flavor of a drink and it’s wetness!’ Obviously this is true, but I like the Wetness in my drinks to taste like something, maybe Whiskey. I too would like my joy to often feel like something, maybe happiness.
There are a great many times when we will not be happy, but still be joyful: that’s why we make this distinction. But the Christian sorrow is still a happier sorrow because of the joy. And emphasizing solely the difference between Joy and Happiness tends towards the less popular sin of feeling like they aren’t associated at all, rather than the more popular sin of confusing them.
Mild outrage is an incredibly addictive emotion. Scientists show that it’s the nearest emotion to happiness, chemically int he brain. honestly even better to experience, because happiness involves forgetting yourself and being smaller than something bigger; mild anger involves pride, snarky comments, gossip, etc.
How many people would convert if Christians were so happy about Easter that they got the cops called on them for a noise complaint at 2 AM on a School night?
Don’t do that, but that’s closer to what Easter properly deserves.