Easter used to be a lot more like Christmas.
Christmas is religious by nature, but not necessarily in observance. A sturdy web of secular traditions is woven around the holiday. You’ve got the displays and parades, a bright aesthetic with no reference to Bethlehem. You can extol and perhaps even enjoy the ties that bind: returning home, the hours with your family, the stock of Christmas-themed love songs. Santa Claus jumps down the chimney with gifts for the good, or at least the nice. A host of earthly pleasures crowds around the heavenly tidings.
Easter has its own secular observances. But it is still largely religious. It is also a fairly minor holiday, and those two facts seem to be connected. Easter occupies a smaller space in the culture than Valentine’s Day.
But Easter used to be more like Christmas – a bigger holiday in the culture, and a more secular holiday in practice. I learned this from a playlist of vintage Easter music. Love songs to (or about) an Easter sweetheart; a playful song about Peter Cottontail and his gifts for children; a nostalgic song about being home for Easter, and the children awake since dawn … Happy and innocent music, sometimes conscious of church as part of the festivities. But you couldn’t glean any idea that Easter Sunday is Resurrection Sunday, or that Good Friday came first.
It is doubtful that Easter ever had the cultural prominence of Christmas. There is no Easter equivalent of A Christmas Carol, “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” or Miracle on 34th Street. Hollywood got quickly to the business of Christmas movies, but even in the era of the Easter parade and Easter finery, they could not produce an Easter classic.
Easter never was as amenable as Christmas to secularization. It is a holiday not easily divorced from the holy, and its joy cannot stand except on the sacred. It is easy to sing of peace on Earth, and mean nothing by it; it’s commonplace to rejoice in a baby’s birth. But you can’t talk about eternal life without significance, and many will never believe that a man rose from the dead. The good news of Easter is greater than the glad tidings of Christmas–but it is a challenge and a demand, a glory that burns.
Perhaps that discomfort spurred the decline of Easter as a popular holiday. Perhaps Easter, even in its merely sentimental form, was too entwined with church, and many people gave up church and Easter together when religion lost its social currency. Maybe people got bored with Easter parades, and Easter finery went out of fashion, and the limited joys of dyed eggs and chocolate bunnies were easily given up.
Whatever the final answer, the slow fade of Easter raises another question: Will Christmas ever sink from its preeminence over all other holidays? It isn’t likely – but is it possible?
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