Almost as inevitably as Santa Claus arriving in department stores and town squares or the appearance of garland and ornaments beside Halloween costumes, there appears the annual debate over the “war on Christmas.” The question is whether Christmas is being obliterated from the public square, with “Merry Christmas” replaced by “Happy Holidays,” the banishment of carols from school choruses, or the generic coffee cups at Starbucks.
I have two different questions: Is there a war on Easter? And has Easter lost?
Let’s be honest. Easter in America is increasingly culturally invisible. “Easter weekend” can come and go and not be noticed by growing numbers of people.
There are many reasons for this invisibility.
First of all, Easter is a lot easier to hide. Christmas, on December 25, can fall on any day of the week. Easter will always fall on a Sunday — which means Easter can always be buried in the weekend. Say goodbye to your work colleagues on Friday, and greet them on Monday: there isn’t a palpable difference between Easter and any other weekend.
Another reason is, like Christmas, growing secularization. Holidays with religious roots are suspect; holidays with religious roots in what is still the religion of the majority of Americans — Christianity — are particularly suspect. It’s a puzzlement of modernity that Americans have let themselves be talked into the proposition that somehow “democracy” requires that majority to strip themselves of a basic identity as the price of “responsible” participation in public life.
But that’s how it is. My son’s school district in northern Virginia pretends that the current weeklong break is “spring holiday” (not unlike Christmas being “winter holiday” for us Druid wannabes). And that district has made noises that, in the future, the current coincidence of “spring holiday” with Easter may be up for grabs.
As a child growing up in New Jersey, I remember Good Friday as a state holiday. Increasingly, it is not. Only about a dozen states still recognize it. As a kid growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I recall that New York television stations paid some heed to Holy Week. “The Afternoon Movie” on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday was usually a feature like The Robe or King of Kings or Barabbas. Honoring the coincidence of Easter and Passover, ABC maintained a tradition until the 1980s of televising Cecil B. DeMille’s “Ten Commandments” on Palm Sunday evening.
That’s all gone with the wind…
Christmas has a lead-up season. Easter does, too, but it’s called Lent, which doesn’t really lend itself to “celebration.” Now, we don’t call Christmas’s lead-up “Advent,” but the secular pre-Christmas season is hardly Advent anyway. It’s not so much a time of “preparation” for Christmas as much as a jump on the holiday: since we’re not likely to be together on December 25, let’s have our “Christmas Party” sometime earlier in December! Christmas lends itself to that kind of anticipation because secularism has managed to do something it can’t with Easter: empty its explicitly religious content.
Finally, the invisibility of Easter is due to its nontransferable religious nature. Unlike Christmas, Easter does not lend itself to secular “translation.” The Easter Bunny cannot replace the Risen Christ like how Santa Claus can overshadow the Christ Child. Our Easter traditions are fairly juvenile, with no adult equivalents: Noël gift-giving finds takers young and old, but chocolate bunnies and Easter egg hunts lose their appeal at a relatively tender age. And while people once upon a time spoke about the “Easter parade,” the casualization of our wardrobes meant that the Easter hat went out at the latest with Elizabeth II. As a kid, I remember that Easter was a time for new shoes and suit. What kids — even what teens — own a suit today?
Finally, Easter is not like non-alcoholic beer: unlike Christmas, where the Christian message can be distilled into generic “peace on earth,” Easter’s proclamation of the conquest of death can’t be divorced from an act of faith. You either take Easter or you leave it. Unlike Christmas, there’s really no Easter lite.
So, unlike Christmas, there’s really no current “war on Easter.” Easter’s been banished, perhaps as some hope one day to do with Christmas. Except those prosecuting that secularization offer us a civil calendar relatively threadbare of common celebration. “Christmas” still hangs in there but usually in drag as “winter holiday.” Thanksgiving increasingly falls into a widening gyre of gluttony accompanied by agnosticism as to the recipient of our thanks. The Fourth of July acknowledges the political origins of a nation, but is it a nation “conceived in liberty” or “conceived in slavery,” a dichotomy for which historical context is dismissed?
In other words, is there much “shared” in our shared secular civil calendar?
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