Easter Blessings

This week is Holy Week, which means it’s time to talk about it and the holiday it leads up to – Easter! Easter holiday is sort of the red-headed stepchild of the Christian holidays, at least compared to something like Christmas. I believe this is because the secular world is unable to capture the feeling of Easter as a holiday. But what is the feeling of Easter?

When I look back on my life, my memories of Easter were always dominated by Easter egg hunts. Truth be told, I didn’t like going outside as a kid. It got too hot, and it bugged me. But I did like going out for Easter because it was fun to hunt for the eggs. Even though I wasn’t good at it, hunting for the eggs was a challenge that I could do for an hour. I would do this with all of my cousins, aunts, and uncles whenever I went to my grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ houses. And then, after I had failed to locate the last egg or two, my family would try to find it. Sometimes, that egg would remain lost, probably snatched up by a wild animal. None of us cared, as this was hilarious.

At my house, the egg hunting took a different form: scavenger hunts my mother would give me eggs with clues that would lead from one place to another. I would get clues like “What you need to do is chill out” which would lead me to the refrigerator. Inside the refrigerator, I’d find an egg with another paper clue inside. These paper clues would lead me from place to place until we finally found a place that had our Easter presents.

The association with eggs and Easter goes way back, with the first recorded use of painted and decorated Easter eggs being in the thirteenth century. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, the Church forbade the eating of eggs during Holy Week, leaving chicken farmers with an abundance of eggs they weren’t allowed to eat. Given they weren’t allowed to eat these eggs, they instead decided to decorate them. These Christians thought eggs symbolized the Resurrection – just as Jesus rose from the tomb, new life would rise from the eggshell.

I think that the Easter egg summarizes the feeling of Easter well. It represents the joy of creation and rebirth, reconciliation and resurrection. It’s a commemoration of Christ’s death and resurrection, the cornerstone upon which the Christian faith is built. It is the oldest of Christian feasts, deriving from the Jewish Passover, the Jewish holiday celebrating the passing of the angel over homes painted with lamb’s blood. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Easter’s connection to the Passover is both real and ideal. It is real because Jesus died during Passover week and ideal because His death and Resurrection represents the paschal lamb of that holiday. This is perhaps the feeling that the secular world is unable to copy from Easter. While the secular Christmas holiday captures the feeling of homecoming and hopeful joy, the secular world seems unable to process the feelings associated with sacrifice and forgiveness of sin.

I think that the Easter holiday has been underrated nowadays. The Church’s fasting requirements are a lot looser now, and Christians don’t observe even those requirements. But the Easter holiday is easy to recapture if we but have the will. Being reborn and becoming something new is certainly something we can all use. I look forward to this year’s egg hunt.