h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm the Easter Bunny I like to celebrate Easter and the arrival of spring by hiding thousands of eggs for people to find.

What Easter traditions are there in your part of the world?
What do you do?

I will be having a lie in those mornings like I do on every bank holiday.

When is it by the way? This bank holiday always catches me unawares as the bloody date keeps changing

This year, Easter falls on Sunday 31st March. Enjoy your lie in!

Easter is named for the pagan Goddess Eostre

The bunny was a hare

We shall be celebrating the original festival, before it was Christianised and therefore lost all meaning.

The festival of Easter may have been Christianised, but it hasn't lost meaning for all the Christians in the world. It's just not the same meaning it originally had. Easter is the most important holiday of the Christian year, so it's a bit much to say it has lost all meaning.

Will wait till all the chocolate is being sold Discount and PARTY!!

I'm going to go out and buy one of those chocolate eggs my grandma used to give us before she died. And besides that enjoy having the day off. Would be nice to find some pagans to celebrate it with though. Roll eggs down hills and such.

But for something traditional here, we make "Gaekke"-letters. You make some paper cut, on which you write a verse. There are some standard ones you can use, but if you are able to make one yourself that is better. Then you sign the letter, but for each letter you put a dot instead. So my name would be ....... You then give it to someone and they have to guess who you are. If they do you have to give them an egg, and if they don't they give you an egg. Usually children will give it to for example their grandmother, who they are the only grandchild of, and yet the grannies are completely unable to guess who it is from and gives them a chocolate egg.

Thankyou Kaz! How does the original festival differ from the Christian one? What will you be doing to celebrate traditionally, that Christian celebrations wouldn't include?

I don't really think they differ much. I don't think the Christians ever added anything to easter. They just started claiming it was theirs. While eggs and lambs and such are all spring symbols, nothing to do with jesus as a sacrificial lamb.

The Christian celebration of Easter does not have anything to do with Easter eggs. Christians know that the Easter eggs are part of a different tradition. You won't find the Easter bunny or Easter eggs as part of any (Christian) religious ceremony at Easter (at least here in Ireland). The Christian celebration of Easter involves singing Alleluia, celebrating and eating a big meal (after having fasted for the 40 days of Lent).

As easter is a spring festival, I celebrate on the spring equinox, on 20/21 March. Generally with meal, dedication, candles, midnight strolls to our sacred tree if weather permits.

On the next weekend, we will be outside to celebrate nature, but we do that everyday, so it won't be that much different.

"...having fasted for the 40 days of Lent."

Um, yes I did that. Ahem.

My Easter won't involve bunnies, thought the odd Cadbury's Cream Egg might not go amiss. Unless anyone I know has anything special going on I'll almost certainly just go to church in the morning and not do much for the rest of the day. Like most Sundays.

In the Greek Orthodox Church, not only do they fast for 40 days before Easter, but they do it before Christmas and some other holiday too!

I will be celebrating Easter with my family. I will get back home from Uni on the Friday before, attend the Palm Sunday mass, then enjoy being home for the week until Good Friday, when there is another mass, then the main feast is celebrated by an Easter Vigil mass on Saturday evening. Overkill on masses, you might say, but it's only about two hours total more than any other week, out of 168. Not much, when you think about it that way, on the most important religious feast of the year.
After the mass, and the social at church afterwards, we go home and have a late evening meal, often pot-au-feu (sp?), before starting one of the games which have become traditional among our family for all gatherings, including weddings, decimal birthdays, etc. These include Trivial Pursuit (the children sit out or 'help' an established player), Boggle and Bonanza, all accompanied with beer.
The next day, those who have a commitment to the choir, reading or somesuch get up for the 9:00 mass, while the rest of us lie in. The day begins with lunch, at which the eggs are handed out but not eaten, then when the meal is finished at 3-4 pm, we will either all sit down to watch something on TV or go our separate ways until someone gets everybody together at 7-9 pm for further games.
Altogether, it's a family thing as much as a religious thing.

"I don't think the Christians ever added anything to easter."

I'm sorry? You mean apart from celebrating the fundamental event around which all of christianity is based?

The conflation of Easter with the pagan spring festival is a quirk of timing, and expediency of the first Christians, who cannily realised that it would be easier for pagans to accept this new religion if there was some continuity between festivals. But Christmas is a better example of this, since that really *is* an arbitrary date.

Easter is celebrated when it is because it happens around the time of the Jewish festival of the passover (celebrating the time that God sent his plagues down onto Egypt, killing the firstborn of the egyptians, but passing over houses marked by the Jews).

However, Easter coincides simply because *that was the date that Jesus was crucified*. He was crucified on the Friday (now Good Friday for reasons that escape me). He was taken down from the cross before sunset because it was the festival of passover, and he couldn't be left. Then, on the following Sunday, his tomb was discovered to be empty.

This is the key event. Christians believe that Jesus allowed himself to be crucified, suffering a horrible death, and in doing so took all of the sin of the world onto his shoulders, allowing mankind to enter heaven when they die (which was previously denied to them for reasons usually attributed to the 'Original Sin' of Adam).

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." is the quote that sums it up best. Even if you don't believe it, that's a very compelling image, I feel.

That's what Christians believe. And the reason it's celebrated when it's celebrated is because, according to the gospels, that's when it happened.

Of course, the timing of the Passover could be a different matter. That could be placed to coincide with the equinox. I don't know whether this is true or not. To be sure, it's unlikely to be anything to do with the native religion of the population of Britain (or whatever it was called then) being completely unconnected in both time and place with Judaism.

What I meant is that besides people going to church, it doesn't seem to me there are any of the traditions that are due to Christianity.

What you seem to be saying Xanatic is: besides all the religious stuff, there don't seem to be any Easter traditions which are based on Christianity! All that religious stuff is what Easter is all about. If you're not religious (like me), then Easter is just a good four days off work (Friday - Monday).

Well, if you'll let us count the run-up to Easter, we have palm crosses and hot-cross buns, but it doesn't have a whole load of traditions associated with it - not necessarily a bad thing.