Easter

Easter On The Net   - The Easter bunny, Easter eggs, and other resources at this site from Holidays on the Net.

Abigail's Easter Ideas - A collection of crafts and recipes for the holiday.

Bunnies And Easter Don't Mix - House Rabbit Society page helps adults make informed decision on purchasing a cute little bunny as an Easter gift.

A Chicken Named Fay - Humorous, animated, musical poem about an ugly chicken and her rabbit friend, and how they got to be symbols of Easter.

Cottontail's Hideaway Resort - Features a history of the holiday, recipes, and links. Includes religious themes.

The Date of Easter - Gives the ecclesiastical rules for setting the date for Easter on calendars, differences with astronomical methods, and the current algorythm used to compute the date every year.

Easter - Includes recipes and information about celebrations, history, customs, and symbols.

Easter - Craft ideas, candy recipes, egg dyeing tips, and poem. Graphics intensive.

Easter - Links to sites about the religious holiday, Easter eggs, the Easter bunny, Easter bonnets, recipes, games; from the University of Illinois.

Easter 2004 - Contain stories, and the history of various Easter symbols, including bunnies and eggs. Includes special recipes and a gifts store.

Easter : 123christians.com - Offers information about Easter, the symbols, and Lent. Also provides cards, recipes, and wallpaper.

Easter At Web Holidays - Relates Easter origins and traditions, provides international Easter recipes, offers craft activities, and markets books and videos.

Easter (from 4anything.com) - Recipes, traditional customs (mostly social rather than religious).

Easter Lily Trivia - Tells of the Easter lily's popularization in the western world and shares tips for keeping the plants healthy.

The Easter Pages - Lets visitors roll a virtual Easter egg, learn about egg decorating, or send a virtual card.

Easter Parade Greeting Card - Animated online greeting and related links.

Everything Easter - Includes original news stories, gift giving tips, craft ideas, and information about the significance of Easter.

Everything Easter - Features crafts, stories, and the history of various Easter symbols.

Happy Easter - Examines the non-religious aspects of Easter; explores how pagan traditions became intermingled with Christian observances of Christ's resurrection. Includes a recipe for chocolate eggs.

Happy Easter From Holiday House - Offers Easter poetry, music and links.

Infoplease.com: Easter and Passover - Features, history, traditions, and candy facts.

It's Spring And Easter Time - Reflections, desktop themes, and spring and Easter links.

Rosie's Easter Basket - Easter poems and stories, an online egg hunt, and recipes.

Springtide Greetings 2000 - Offers annotated links for Easter, the vernal equinox, and other cross-cultural springtide customs.

A Very Happy Easter to All from Twilight Bridge - Learn about the origin of Easter, the significance of the holiday's symbols, and about fasting, cuisine, games, and crafts.

Whyeaster.com - Easter traditions around the world, fun activities, and why Easter exists.

Easter - information

Easter is a Christian holiday commemorating the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead on the Sunday after his crucifixion on Good Friday and marking the end of Lent. Easter is the holiest day in the Christian calendar, followed by Christmas and is recognized as a legal holiday in most countries with a significant Christian tradition, with the notable exception of the United States where Easter is only celebrated on Easter Sunday (and not also on Easter Monday).

The timing of Easter depends on the Jewish Pesach, in English Passover, which commemorates the sparing of the Hebrew first-born, as recounted in Exodus, since it is during this holiday that Jesus is believed to have been resurrected. In Western christianity Easter Day must always fall on a Sunday on one of the 35 possible dates between March 22 and April 25.

The date of Easter

Easter and the holidays that are related to it are moveable feasts, in that they do not fall on a fixed date in the Gregorian calendar (which follows the motion of the Sun and the seasons). Instead, they are based on a lunar calendar like that used by the Jews. At the First Council of Nicaea in 325 it was decided that Easter would be celebrated on the Sunday after the 14th day of the first lunar month of spring (in theory, the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox). Eventually, all churches accepted the Alexandrian method of computing Easter, which set the northern hemisphere vernal equinox at 21 March (the actual equinox may fall one or two days earlier or later), and the date of the full moon was to be determined by using the Metonic cycle. A problem here is the difference between the western churches and the Eastern Orthodox Churches. The former now use the Gregorian calendar to calculate the date of Easter, while the latter still use the original Julian calendar. The World Council of Churches proposed a reform of the method of determining the date of Easter at a summit in Aleppo, Syria, in 1997. This reform would have eliminated the difference in the date between the Eastern and Western churches. The reform was due to be implemented starting in 2001, but it failed. See Reform of the date of Easter.

Computing the date of Easter, known as computus, is somewhat complicated. The Wiki page explains the traditional tabular methods, but also has algorithms such as the one developed by the famous mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Easter has not fallen on the earliest date possible, March 22, since 1818, and will not do so again until 2285; it fell on the latest possible date, April 25 most recently in 1943, and will next fall on that date in 2038.

Western Christianity

In Western Christianity, Easter marks the end of the forty-six days of Lent, a period of fasting and penitence in preparation for Easter, which begins on Ash Wednesday and ends on Easter Sunday. Lent really comprises 40 days since the 6 Sundays during this period are excluded from the Lenten fast, and are days that set apart to commemorate Easter Sunday. Alternatively, Lent can be said to comprise the 40 days from the first Sunday of Lent to the Thursday of Holy Week. Ash Wednesday and the four days following it, while penitential days, are thus not included in Lent proper.

The days before Easter also are special in the Christian tradition: the Sunday before is Palm Sunday, and the last three days before Easter are Maundy Thursday or Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday (sometimes referred to as Silent Saturday). Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday respectively commemmorate Jesus's entry in Jerusalem, the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday are sometimes referred to as the Triduum (Latin for "Three Days"). In some countries Easter lasts two days, Sunday and Monday, called first and second Easter day, or "Easter Monday".

Pentecost is seven weeks after Easter.

Eastern Christianity

In Eastern Christianity, preparations begin with Great Lent. Following the fifth Sunday of Great Lent is Palm Week, which ends with Lazarus Saturday. Lazarus Saturday officially brings Great Lent to a close, although the fast continues for the following week. After Lazarus Saturday comes Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and finally Easter itself, or Pascha, and the fast is broken immediately after the Divine Liturgy. Easter is immediately followed by Bright Week, during which there is no fasting, even on Wednesday and Friday.

Other celebrations of Easter

As with other Christian dates, Easter is also commercially important, with big sales of confectionery such as chocolate Easter eggs, marshmallow bunnies, Peeps, jelly beans, and greeting cards.

In the United States, the Easter holiday has been secularized, such that the main holiday event for many Americans is the coloring of Easter eggs, followed on Easter Sunday by an Easter egg hunt, in which young children gather the eggs that have been hidden in their homes or yards. According to the children's stories, eggs and other treats are delivered by the Easter Bunny in the form of an Easter basket which children find waiting for them when they wake up on Easter Sunday. The Easter Bunny's motives for doing this are seldom clarified.

Names

Some Germanic languages may have named the holiday after the goddess Eostre, although there is no direct evidence of this. It is equally as likely that the holiday was named after "Eostremonat", which was the spring month it usually occurred in. After all, nobody would presume that "Good Friday" (which precedes Easter) is named after the Norse goddess Freyja merely because the day "Friday" is named for her.

English Easter

German Ostern

However, in most Christian-dominated nations, namely the European, the names of Easter are from Hebrew pésah ("Passover"):

Latin pascha (or Festa Paschalia)

French Pâques

Italian Pasqua

Lower Rhine German Paisken

Spanish Pascua

Scottish Pask

Gaeilge Cáisc

Dutch Pasen

Danish Paaske

Swedish Pask

Bulgarian Paskha (or Velikden)

Symbolism of Easter

The religious symbolism of Easter is explicitly Christian, with many elements adapted from the Passover celebration in Judaism for example, the image of Jesus as the Lamb of God, which is linked to the Jewish paschal lamb. The Christian celebration of Jesus' Resurrection also paralleled pagan celebrations of nature's rebirth in the spring; the traditional customs of Easter eggs and the Easter Bunnys (originally a hare) are both tied to pre-Christian paganism.

Some Christian fundamentalists reject nearly all the customs surrounding Easter, believing them to be irrevocably tainted with paganism and idolatry. The Jehovah's Witnesses do not celebrate Easter at all, believing it to be entirely a pagan invention.

When is Easter?

West (Roman Catholic and Protestant)

2000 April 23

2001 April 15

2002 March 31

2003 April 20

2004 April 11

2005 March 27

2006 April 16

2007 April 8

2008 March 23

2009 April 12

2010 April 4

2011 April 24

East (Orthodox)

2000 April 30

2001 April 15

2002 May 5

2003 April 27

2004 April 11

2005 May 1

2006 April 23

2007 April 8

2008 April 27

2009 April 19

2010 April 4

2011 April 24

Source: information here is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Easter.