greybean.com

Okay, here’s the thing: Easter is not a real holiday. It just isn’t. I could leave it at that, but, just for fun, let’s prove the theorem…

First, we’ll need to establish the criteria by which real holidays distinguish themselves from the others. Here are the three I’ve come up with:

1. The holiday celebrates something that we’re all basically forced to acknowledge for one reason or another.
2. The commercialization of the holiday has reached a point where it’s an inescapable part of our popular culture.
3. Schools and most businesses are closed because of the holiday.

By those criteria, then, here are the real holidays:

New Year’s
Independence Day
Thanksgiving
Xmas

New Year’s (which encompasses basically the 24-hour period from noon on December 31st to noon on January 1st) is pretty obvious. The ball drops, we buy new calendars, we have to remember to write the date differently… It’s hard not to think of New Year’s as a real holiday. And, actually, it’s the only holiday that’s there to acknowledge a real, current event, not some intangible idea or the memory of a past event. For Americans, the 4th of July and Thanksgiving are hard to escape as significant, legitimate celebrations of our nation’s heritage… or something. Not to mention the skyward explosions and ubiquitous turkeys. And Thanksgiving is the official beginning of the roughly six-week period where the entire planet spends too much money and eats too much food while watching the same four movies and listening to the same six songs over and over again, year in and year out. Xmas (the real holiday, not Christmas) is the climax of that period and, for many people, it’s the biggest, realest holiday of the year. And, secondarily, December 25th is basically the day that Christmas, Hanukah and Kwanzaa all get lumped into, and it’s the day that we celebrate the event on which our year-numbering system is based.

After that, there are the secondary holidays:

Valentine’s Day
Halloween
Christmas

The first two meet only one of the three criteria: the second—and most important—one. Christmas meets the third criteria, but it’s really a purely religious holiday that flirts with the first two criteria but has, at this point, been totally eclipsed by its secular commercialist cousin, Xmas. Schools don’t have Christmas recess, they have holiday recess. Like I said, Xmas is an amalgamation of all of the end-of-December holidays.

It’s the third group of holidays into which I’d say Easter falls:

New Year’s Day
Easter
Memorial Day
Labor Day

Only New Year’s Day meets the first criteria, they’re all partially successful at the second one and three of them meet the third one (and it’s on this basis that they’re partially successful at the second criteria). New Year’s Day is significant in most of the ways that New Year’s is (as enumerated above), but, at that point, it’s celebrating an event in the past and it ends up being just the day that most of the planet is thankful they have off from work as they need to use it to recover from their New Year’s Eve celebrations. Memorial Day is significant in that it’s nominally the beginning of summer and it’s often the biggest movie release weekend of the year (dollar and cents-wise). Labor Day is significant in that the beginning of the school year is loosely based on when it occurs.

Easter? Easter has the Easter Bunny, Cadbury Cream Eggs and Peeps. That’s it. See, Easter’s two great weaknesses are that a.) it’s a purely religious holiday that hasn’t fully crossed the secular commercialism barrier and 2. it’s on Sunday, so basically nothing is closed purely because of it. It’s Passover plus Peeps. A real holiday that does not make. What are the Easter movies? The Greatest Story Ever Told. Ben-Hur. The Passion of the Christ. What would you rather watch: “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” or one of those Charlton Heston flicks?

In fact, I would posit that this group of holidays only out-distances St. Patrick’s Day by the thinnest of margins. Whole cities are brought to their knees by the events of that day. And you can’t wear green (or orange) on March 17th without it meaning something to most people. And you can’t try to tell me that St. Patrick’s Day is a real holiday, now, can you?

So, what I’m saying is that for a holiday that is so very close to entirely religion-based, people shouldn’t expect all businesses to be closed because of it, people shouldn’t expect everyone they know to be heading somewhere for “Easter dinner” and, mostly, people shouldn’t tell everyone they encounter over the week prior to Easter to “have a good holiday.” Next month, for the week of April 18th, try telling all of the people who ring you out at the grocery store or pump your gas or deliver your mail, “if I don’t see you, have a great holiday…” Or, “do you have people coming over for the Seder or do you go out somewhere?” See how that goes.

Don’t even get me started on Palm Sunday or Good Friday…