Happy Easter

I made a rather rambling complaint yesterday about how the media shys away from saying "Merry Christmas". This came up because I was wondering if they still bothered to say "Happy Easter" or if it were just "Happy Holidays" or "Happy Bunny Day". While at Christmas time it is almost impossible to find anything that explictly says "Christmas" on the label, during Easter there are still packages that say "Easter" on them. There were even chocolate crosses in the candy aisle, which surprised me.

Anyway, I was saying this to someone and they told me that it would be more important if Christmas and Easter weren't "stolen holidays" that the Christians replaced with "less sinful" celebrations. I really wanted to respond to that, but I know it would just start a small war in the chat box. So I'm over here instead, preaching to the choir.

It isn't so simple as stealing holidays. In fact, there were no holidays before Christians. Holidays=Holy Days. Well, maybe pagan Holy Days. Definitely Pagan festivals. Christians did schedule their days of celebration to match up with the Romans', but not just so we could have "less sinful" celebrations. Anyone who knows a little bit of history about this time knows that the Christians weren't so popular with either the Romans or the Jews. There was a lot of persecution happening and it was hard to practice the faith openly. So having Christian celebrations on the same day the Romans were having their winter bash was a really smart move. Who would question the little get together going on at Uncle Peter's when the whole town was getting their groove on?

It did, however, serve to eventually "steal" the "more sinful" celebrations through the clever tactic of double-booking. To honor this ancient achievement Church secretaries of today constantly pay tribute by booking the church fair for the same Sunday as the Knight's of Columbus fund raiser.

What in the world is "less sinful" supposed to mean, anyway? The whole point of any Christian celebration is to not sin at all. We prefer elimination rather than moderation on this point. I can just imagine the committee of Christians way back in the when. Going over to the Romans with a petition.

"Hello. We're the Christians. We're new. We noticed that your parties get kind of rowdy around here and we were wondering if you could tone it down a bit? Little quieter on the drunken singing, please, and maybe water the wine about 10% more? Oh, you don't have to stop, just be a little less sinful. Thanks awfully."