Well pleaseth me the sweet time of Easter
That maketh the leaf and the flower come out. - Bertran de Born
As I’ve pointed out before, all of the Christian holidays are merely pagan ones dressed up in a new garb, and though they may have some explanation derived from Christian catechism most of them are still pagan to the core. This is true of three of them more than any of the others: Halloween is still the Day of the Dead as it has always been; Christmas is still the festival of the reborn sun, celebrated with revelry and song and greenery and gift-giving as it has been for millennia; and Easter is still the observance of rebirth, with Christ standing in for all the vegetation-gods who came before him, Tammuz and Attis and Adonis and Osiris, slain and buried to rise again from the dead. Just as the dye which colors the shell of an Easter egg has little (if any) effect on the substance of the egg beneath, so it is with the holiday itself; the theological rationalizations and the complex religious pageantry have not changed the day’s deeper meaning one iota, and devout Christians still employ the ancient symbols of flower, hare and egg. This is why it matters little to me that we observe the holiday on the Christian date rather than the traditional astronomical one; it’s only fitting that I bend the Christian day to my needs just as Christianity bent the ancient pagan holiday to its.
