Easter, being movable, is an annoying feast for a culture that likes to plan ahead. Just over a century ago it fell on March 22. Then again, it could be as late as April 25.
This year, it’s quite late: April 16. This makes holidays and, more crucially, the commercial Easter – which is essentially about chocolate – harder to plan. That was one reason why Parliament, in a fit of quite magnificent insularity, legislated in 1928 that Easter should henceforth fall between April 9 and April 16 (that’s still on the statute books). The rest of Christendom has yet to follow suit, though it doesn’t stop secularists periodically asking that the spring school holidays be separated from Easter.
It’s an instance of how the rhythm of the Church’s year, based on the lunar calendar and the Jewish Passover, is not really suited to contemporary urban and commercial life – thank God. And the dates of other feasts depend on the vagaries of Easter.
Ascension Day should be 40 days after Easter, except that the Church in England and Wales has unhelpfully transferred it to the next Sunday (don’t get me started). Whit, or Pentecost, Sunday should be 50 days after Easter. Neither of these latter feasts impinge on the secular consciousness, though the Whit weekend was once famous.
But Easter is still embraced by the culture, which is half the trouble. Ours is a society that’s perfectly hospitable to feasts, so long as they are commercially exploitable. And Easter, though it obviously doesn’t offer anything like the consumption opportunities that Christmas does, is still good as a festival of chocolate, spring flowers and legs of lamb.
As for hot cross buns, they’ve been available in M&S for weeks. Unlike in Spain, where the Holy Week spectacle rather peters out by Easter Sunday, the actual Passion doesn’t loom large here, except as a bank holiday. Indeed, before bank holidays were formally introduced, Good Friday was, besides Sundays, one of only two public holidays that Protestant England allowed for, the other being Christmas Day. At present, it’s an opportunity to get on with the Easter bank holiday travel.
But the real problem with Easter, as with Christmas, is that we get it the wrong way round. We stuff the shops with Easter eggs before Lent even starts. We eat them on Easter Sunday, and after Easter Monday (another travel opportunity) the whole thing finishes. But the true Easter season just gets going as most people are getting over it.
Easter Sunday is the start of the 40 days of Easter until the Ascension. It’s a celebratory time. At least, unlike with Christmas, people don’t start a diet and exercise regime right in the middle of the festivities, as happens at New Year. But there’s an odd sensation that the Church is just getting started as everyone else is winding down.
Part of the problem, perhaps, is the displacement of Lent by Dry January. It’s a bit weird how the usual diet and abstinence that starts with New Year’s resolutions has managed to turn into an entire month of not drinking. But that’s what we’ve ended up with: a dry season at the very time of the year when you need a drink and in the very season when your Christian duty is to celebrate the Incarnation.
At least Lent is in spring; it’s less bleak, though obviously our Lenten promises are risibly lax by comparison with pre-Reformation abstinence – from dairy products as well as meat (chocolate didn’t feature), and sex for good measure. Sundays, being a feast of the Resurrection, offer a respite. But if the abstinence was stringent, the explosion of compensating carnality at Easter and afterwards must have been quite something.
That cycle of fast, then feast, has been lost.Indeed, if you want to get a feeling for a quasi-medieval fasting regime, try the Eastern Orthodox churches – they do these things properly. Their colouring and blessing of eggs is also fabulously non-commercial and pretty. Their fast, as far as I can make out, amounts to beans, which can be really good, cooked and then baked simply with onions and olive oil, but it can get monotonous. The medieval diet of fish in Lent would have palled too.
The way to get counter-cultural, as with Christmas, is simply to extend the feasting season. Just as Christmas should last until Candlemas, and emphatically for the full Twelve Days (viz, long after everyone else has given up), so Easter is for celebrating from Easter Sunday on. I suppose it would be pushing it to be in full festive mode for 40 days, but we could save festivities for then rather than Lent.
For now, let’s just resolve to keep hot cross buns for Good Friday, and not before. Did you know that eating them is meant to bring luck and plentiful victuals in the year ahead? Go for it!
Melanie McDonagh is comment editor of the London Evening Standard
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