Day 41

i personally don't celebrate easter, well not these days. i mean why should i. i'm not a christian and in our society easter relates back to the christian celebration of jesus dying on the cross for 'our' sins. today's society seems much more interested in buying as many chocolate easter eggs as possible and making ourselves sick. oh and the days off work/school. in saying that i do like hot cross buns, and always make an effort to have them on good friday.
this year i got thinking, especially as i live with a christian....what does the word easter actually mean. it doesn't sounds particularly related to the death of someone on a cross. although celebrating 'crucifixion' would maybe be a little morbid. resurrection possibly not so bad. so i looked up the meaning of easter.. which in fact comes from an old pagan festival, which as megs explained to me, is quite common in christianity. the old church often took pagan festivals and made them into their own, per say. so the meaning of easter is thus; "old english ēastre; of germanic origin and related to german ostern and east . according to bede the word is derived from eastre, the name of a goddess associated with spring". and hence the eggs & chicks & bunnies etc.....new life, which we all knew about. this also ties into the timing of celebration of easter which always occurs on the first Sunday, after the first full moon following the northern spring equinox, so in our cases autumn equinox (this is only true for western christianity, eastern is different again as they use the julian calendar).
which brings me round to easter celebrations and how once again we (down south) are dominated by northern hemisphere in our celebrations.....snow at xmas, new life at easter although we are in the opposite season. i know it's tradition, and way back when we didn't even exist. i guess going back to the christian origns again, it is meant to be a celebration of jesus' life and his resurrection.
i have extremely simplified it here, as i could keep going and going but i guess the main point really is that, for so many of us, that get frustrated and annoyed at religion and it's connotations, we are seemingly happy to jump on the band-wagon of their celebrations.