Easter is the best holiday, hands down, no debate. In October, when the first Christmas decorations start to appear, it triggers deep dread in all right-thinking people. I’m in the US, where Thanksgiving doesn’t land for me, ditto the Fourth of July. There’s no day off for Halloween, but in any case that’s an occasion just for the kids. Like everything else, Easter has become more commercial – the shops are full of wicker baskets stuffed with shredded paper that once spilled, will never fully be expunged from your home. But relative to other holidays, it feels like the one grownup break in the year. Truly, who can be miserable about the advent of spring?
For non-believers raised in a roughly Christian tradition, part of the joy of Easter has to do with it being uncoupled from religion without an attendant secular mythology springing up in its place. “The Easter bunny isn’t real,” said one of my children this week, and after giving it a moment’s thought, I realised she was right. No one sells the Easter bunny as real to their kids, even as we shill desperately for Santa and the Tooth Fairy. I’m not sure why this is; on paper, a giant bunny isn’t any more ludicrous than a fat man flying on a sleigh. But no one cares enough about Easter to put in the ground work and the resulting low pressure of the event is sublime.
