Holiday Engineering
Let’s talk about Christmas and Easter and how they work as holidays. For lack of a better term, maybe we’ll call it vibe engineering.
Yes, Christmas is a bigger deal than Easter as a holiday and there are extremely good reasons for that. If you want to make Easter a bigger deal for you (as per the Brethren in April conference), you need to understand something about holidays and apply your knowledge. You can’t just willpower your way into feeling more celebratory.
Each holiday has certain holiday flavors to it. Thanksgiving for instance has Family, Heritage, and Gratitude. Those all organically flow from the nature of the holiday and the time of year it is at.
Christmas has a lot. There is a strong Family element, both for traditional reasons, because it is celebrating something that happens overnight so a morning celebration is appropriate which is when you are more likely to be with family, and mostly because the holiday is celebrating the formation of the Holy Family.
It has Gifts, both because of tradition, the wise men, and also because its a birthday and we associate gifts with birthdays. And because Christbaby is a gift.
There is a strong element of, dunno, Spirituality, transcending, stuff like that, because of the way you see the stars at night in the cold air (and a little bit because of how you are more likely to see sunrises and sunsets at this time of year, it draws your eye heavenwards). This ties organically into the holiday both because of the time of year and because of the star and the angels in the heavens theme that is already part of the story. This ties in with the Light theme, that comes both from the time of year (lights are effective in the dark months), from various scriptures about Christ, and from the Star part of the story.
And so on and so on. Caroling—the angels sang, and also surprising people at their house with a song works better when its dark out.
Notice how organic and tied in this all is.
In contrast, a lot of Easter features are dumb because they don’t connect to anything. What does the easter bunny have to do with it? Nothing. Ditto chocolates and eggs. There is a mild tenuous Spring connection and that’s about it.
So lets say you wanted to add more of a Family element to your Easter. Here’s one idea for an organic connection. Easter is about resurrection and for the LDS, resurrection occurs in family groups. We also have the scripture story of dead Saints appearing in resurrected form to their families in Israel when Christ resurrected. If you talk about family members resurrecting, if you read Joseph Smith on resurrecting family members, if you put out photos of your dead and gone on your door, or if you even have someone represent your dead family members and come knocking on your door and them hug everyone and say something about their life—that would make a real Family connection for the holiday.
Understanding how holidays work could also help you have a better Christmas if you want.
Eric
December 10, 2023
Thanksgiving observations are centered around the feast, including a strong association with certain foods (turkey, cranberries, et al). Christmas cuisine is a bit more varied, but for a lot of people also includes a feast. Christmas also includes all that gift giving, and is certainly not hurt by its close proximity to the end of the year when people are most likely to celebrate the past year and be more generous to others.
Easter has none of those things naturally going for it: no feasts, no gift exchanges, no year-end reflections. Eggs and candy are the foods most strongly associated with Easter, but those aren’t enough to comprise a feast, and no other food is as universally connected with the holiday the way turkey is with Thanksgiving. I myself would nominate ham for that role, since Christ’s fulfillment of the law means we don’t have to eat kosher anymore, but I’m just one person, and ham isn’t quite the rarely eaten treat that turkey is.
Of course, attempting to make Easter observances into a bigger production will lead to the holiday becoming so commercialized that people will forget the true meaning of the holiday (more than they already do, that is), just like has happened to Halloween.
E.C.
December 10, 2023
I’m not sure I quite agree with either of you on Easter, though G.’s idea is closer to a start at it.
For me, Easter is about Mourning turned to Joy. It’s preceded by the tail end of winter, the time of year when food often ran scarce and sickness and death were near companions. That was on people’s minds as Lent came, so after 40 days of fasting and cold and mourning, the slowly growing light and warmth of Easter built into joy at the renewal of life that Christ promised.
So Spring is actually a powerful, built-in reminder of the Resurrection that comes after Christ’s Atonement, but in my opinion Easter only works if there’s some period of sorrow, fasting, and repentance beforehand.
It could certainly tie into family in that way, G., but in many Hispanic cultures they already have that in El Dia de Muerto, All Saint’s Day, just after Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve), and if we’re trying for seasonal appropriateness, autumn is the perfect season for remembrance.
As for Eric’s points about feasts, well, you’re not wrong, there really ought to be a specific food associated with a holiday, even if it’s family-specific, and ham’s as good a candidate as any (except my dad can’t eat ham, it does bad things for him). I suspect that eggs became associated with the holiday because that’s the time of year when suddenly there’s a glut, since chickens lay according to hours of light. If we’re trying for resonance with the themes of Easter, lamb is very appropriate, but it’s a rather rare meat in our country still.
Music is very much tied to Easter – there’s loads of Easter oratorios, Lenten music, etc. There’s even a recently written oratorio called ‘Lamb of God’ by Rob Gardner which I would HIGHLY recommend, and one called ‘Road to Emmaus’, which is far more modern and not quite as easily accessible. And – of course – Handel’s Messiah is still the gold standard for Easter music, or Bach’s Passions. The Passions were meant to be performed during Easter celebrations, after all.
John Mansfield
December 11, 2023
I second E.C. that if you want a fully meaningful Easter you have to pass through Lent. Even the candy makes sense in that context as a symbol of Christ’s triumph.
For last April’s General Conference the speakers went crazy with Holy Week talk. As I mentioned then, “The frequent discussion of Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter left me wondering how I would take it if the next time I attend Sunday School, the instructor and everyone else in the room had switched to always referring to the New Testament Christians as Saint Thomas, Saint Stephen, Saint Luke, etc., and always called Jesus’ mother ‘the Blessed Virgin Mary.'” In some ways it feels like letting the Restoration go to waste, re-encrusting it with a couple millennia of tradition.
Regarding holiday engineering, my favorite holiday is the Fourth of July. It is a real holiday, celebrated in familiar ways, not a generic day off from work, but it doesn’t take elaborate days- or weeks-long preparation. You can wake up that morning having done nothing beforehand and still enjoy watermelon, grilled hamburgers, fireworks, and thinking about how fun it is to be an American.
E.C.
December 11, 2023
@ John Mansfield,
I would say that rather than re-encrusting the Restoration, what the Church is doing now is what Joseph Smith did: finding and re-contextualizing forgotten truths in light of a new understanding of the Gospel. For me, they were pointing out that the fundamental truths that were lost in apostacy were still there, in fragments, just waiting for someone to find them again and put them back in their proper place. Restoration is, after all, the restoring of something old to a new state, not building something new from scratch.
County cat lady
December 18, 2023
Long time reader. Funnily enough, this is the first post where I felt my commenting was imperative. You all MUST know what we had for Easter dinner this year! Haha! We had fish and honeycomb for dinner in honor of the resurrected Lord’s meal with his disciples. Plus we had cheese and crackers and grapes just because we like those but with no symbolic significance.
G.
December 18, 2023
What a splendid idea