by Nancy Seddens

Created on: January 06, 2010

Like many religious holidays, Easter is an amalgamation of the celebration of an event with religious significance and pagan celebrations that predate the common adoption of the religion it has come to be associated with.  As Christianity spread throughout Europe it didn’t meet as much resistance as one would think because the pagans already were worshiping more then one god and were willing to add another one. It was a little more of a hard sell to convince them to believe in only one God.

The biggest obstacle to becoming Christians and forsaking all other Gods was giving up their pagan celebrations. Early Christian missionaries realized that they were going to have to give the people a substitute for their pagan holidays and did their best to sublimate pagan seasonal celebrations with Christian religious ones. The missionaries were so successful in their endeavor that even non-Christians make note of and to some degree celebrate Christmas and Easter while the pagan celebration of mid-summers eve is all but forgotten although Halloween has, despite not having a Christian celebration associated, with it managed to hang on.

Secular symbols of Easter such as the Easter Bunny and colored eggs are fertility symbols that were borrowed from paganism and reworked to symbolize Easter only to rejected of late by fundamental Christians as being too pagan.  The word Easter is taken, according to St. Bede an 8th century English scholar, from the goddess Eastre or Eostre who was the Germanic goddess of spring.  Eastre had a whole month dedicated to her with her festival coinciding with the spring equinox.

People love symbols and seem to have an innate desire to celebrate the seasons as they change and even those who consider themselves neither Christian nor pagan still thrill at the arrival of Easter flowers, pastel eggs and fluffy bunnies. Like Halloween, a pagan inspired holiday that Christianity failed to sublimate, Easter is strongly associated with Candy; specifically jelly beans, chocolate (in the form of bunnies and eggs) and yellow marshmallow – flavored confections in the shape of baby chicks, called Peeps. For many years Peeps could only be found at Easter but they were so popular that they began appearing in different colors and shapes for different holidays and can not be bought year round.

 Easter Sunday for Christians is also the time to begin wearing spring clothes (brand new if possible) to church. Just as Memorial Day is the symbolic arrival of summer so Easter is the symbolic arrival of spring and although spring clothes appear in stores long before Easter, clothing sales increase as Easter approaches and everyone sets their mind on spring.

It is a strange world we live in where Christians have tried to eliminate paganism by taking over their celebrations and in the process borrowing many of the pagan symbols and where in turn Christianity has been set rejected by many while favoring its pagan symbols. It appears that we humans just love to celebrate and do it with symbolism that we can all relate to.

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