It's Easter, Right?
My changing relationship to holidays, ritual, and religion
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Today is Easter. Apparently.
It was a gray and rainy day here in Massachusetts and my family and I went grocery shopping. Today didn’t feel any differently than any other Sunday. It didn’t feel like a holiday. Which is odd.
I didn’t really expect our local grocery store to be closed today, but I figured I would double check their Instagram to make sure they were open before we headed out. They had regular hours.
I remember as a child that Easter was second only to Christmas in terms of big holidays. Stores and restaurants were all closed and families spent time together. It was a day with big gifts. One year I got a skateboard.
As I’ve written about before, I was raised in a Catholic family and took the ritual of the faith seriously, even if my own conscious seemed to clash with the actual teachings.
I stopped practicing Catholicism more than 20 years ago, but it took me a bit longer to officially drop the label. There was never a clear moment where the Church and I broke up, we just kind of ghosted each other and never bothered trying to get back in touch.
My kids have never had any religious teachings inform their childhood, although Easter was still kind of a special day. When they were younger, my wife would fill plastic eggs with little treats and I would hide them around our backyard. One year we were on a cruise ship for Easter and the culinary team had decorated large chocolate eggs to adorn the dining room. Another year, we were at the Von Trapp Family Lodge in Vermont, a place I’ve written about before. Last year, we spent Easter Sunday in Amish Country around Lancaster, PA and went for a train ride on an old steam train where the Easter Bunny walked car to car to take photos.
My kids are older now, 10 and 13, and they’ve outgrown egg hunts and photos with people in bunny suits.
Without the secular version of Easter, the only choice is to celebrate the religious version, which I’m not doing. Apparently I’m not alone.
According to a Pew Research study from 2023, 28% of U.S. adults now identify as “atheists, agnostics, or nothing in particular.” That number has been on a steady rise over the last two decades.
Perhaps that’s why my grocery store was open and why I saw so many other businesses operating like normal today. Easter didn’t feel like a big deal to me anymore, and I sense many others are feeling that too.
In fact, I think we’re all grappling with the new reality of an incredibly siloed culture, which has ripple effects far beyond whether this was a time of Easter, Passover, something else, or nothing.
Ratings for the Oscars were down 9% this year compared to last year, and it was one of the lowest rated telecasts since COVID. Maybe nobody is watching the Oscars because fewer people are going to the movies. It’s been about a year since I was last in a movie theatre, and that was to see a Disney movie with my kids. I honestly can’t remember the last time that I went to see an adult movie that interested me. There just hasn’t been anything that made me want to spend that money in a long time.
I was recently asked by somebody what new TV shows or movies I like. My wife and I are currently on our second time watching The Good Place, a series that premiered a decade ago, but we’re hardly watching much TV. The person asking me went on to tell me about two shows that he was watching and he may as well have been speaking Greek. I had no idea the title, the actors, or the show creator from what he was telling me.
I may not watch TV shows as much anymore, but that’s not to say I don’t consume video. It just tends to be short form content on platforms like Instagram and YouTube. I have certain creators and channels that I like. I feel a deep connection to these random creators, but most other people in my life would have no idea who any of these people are.
A generation ago everybody watched shows like Cheers or Friends. It was “Must See TV,” and people would excitedly go to work or school the next day to gossip about Sam and Diane or Ross and Rachel.
Now I’m watching a YouTube channel where two guys in Pennsylvania review mediocre cars from the 1980s and 1990s and you’ve probably never even heard of these people.
The same goes for music, fashion, politics. We are being served custom plates of exactly what appeals to us and are missing out on the communal dining experience.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m okay with the fact that Easter feels more like a regular day and that there isn’t some Christian norm imposed on everybody, especially at a time when Christians aren’t as much the norm.
But I do wonder what we lose when every day starts to feel like every other and when we don’t make the time and space to mark the passage of time or to celebrate those around us. Or when our experience of shared culture is no longer shared.
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As a fairly new resident of New England I was struck by how many places were open with business as usual compared to Texas where we moved from. There virtually every place is closed and if you go out you will see lots of people dressed up in their Easter finery. And all the churches have to hire security to direct traffic and handle parking! Of course, many of those people are only Easter/Christmas attenders. Truthfully, I’ve been struck by how a-religious this area is in general, though I probably shouldn’t be as one of the reasons we left Texas was to escape overt (toxic?) religiosity and I made sure that wasn’t a factor in our new town!
So much similarity to my experience… growing up, we had Easter at my house. All the relatives came into our small house and we had a blast with our cousins. Before Sunday, there was Holy Thursday, Good Friday and the Easter Vigil on Saturday night (about 4-5 hours total on those hard wooden pews). Late Saturday nights prepping food, I can still smell the garlic and parsley marinade for the lamb.
Now? 8 of us had dinner at my brothers’ - including my twin, my mom, aunt, spouses, and kids. We still do secular stuff like baskets but it lacks the music, cooking, and playing games inside and outside. Even though I haven’t been to a mass for at least 3 decades, Easter meant renewal and the end of long winters. The smell of incense and lillies, Italian pastries and Xavier Cugat in the background.
Today I took a 3 hour nap and read 3/4 of a book. Too normal…maybe new traditions can start next year, I’ll just have to figure out what that is… thanks for sharing!!