XPost: alt.christnet.religion, alt.religion, alt.religion.christianity   
   XPost: alt.christnet.theology, soc.history   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Why Easter never became a big secular holiday like Christmas   
   Hint: the Puritans were involved.   
      
   By Tara Isabella Burton@NotoriousTIBtara.burton@vox.com Mar 29, 2018,   
      
   Christians from a variety of traditions will celebrate Easter this   
   Sunday. Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his   
   crucifixion. For many Christians, including those from Eastern   
   Orthodox traditions (who generally celebrate Easter later than Western   
   Christians, as they use a different calendar), Easter is the most   
   important Christian holiday of all.   
      
   But in North America and Europe, Easter has a diminished cultural   
   force as a time for secular celebration — its wider cultural cachet   
   hardly approaches that of Christmas. As Jesuit priest and writer James   
   Martin wryly wrote for Slate, “Sending out hundreds of Easter cards   
   this year? Attending way too many Easter parties? ... Getting tired of   
   those endless Easter-themed specials on television? I didn’t think   
   so.”   
      
   So why don’t we celebrate Easter the way we do Christmas? The answer   
   tells us as much about the religious and social history of America as   
   it does about either holiday. It reveals the way America’s holiday   
   “traditions” as we conceive of them now are a much more recent and   
   politically loaded invention than one might expect.   
   The Puritans weren’t fans of either holiday   
      
   Christmas and Easter were roughly equal in cultural importance for   
   much of Christian history. But the Puritans who made up the   
   preponderance of America’s early settlers objected to holidays   
   altogether. Echoing an attitude shared by the English Puritans, who   
   had come to short-lived political power in the 17th century under   
   Oliver Cromwell, they decried Christmas and Easter alike as times of   
   foolishness, drunkenness, and revelry.   
      
   Cotton Mather, among the most notable New England preachers, lamented   
   how “the feast of Christ’s nativity is spent in reveling, dicing,   
   carding, masking, and in all licentious liberty ... by mad mirth, by   
   long eating, by hard drinking, by lewd gaming, by rude reveling!” As   
   historian Stephen Nissenbaum wrote in The Battle for Christmas,   
   “Christmas was a season of ‘misrule’ a time when ordinary behavioral   
   restraints could be violated with impunity.”   
      
   Like other feasting days (such as the pre-Lent holiday we now call   
   Mardi Gras), Christmas was a dangerous time in which social codes   
   could be violated and social hierarchies upended. (Among the practices   
   Puritans objected to was the popularity of the “Lord of Misrule,” a   
   commoner allowed to preside as “king” over the festivities in noble   
   houses for the day.)   
      
   The very nature of having a holiday, furthermore, was seen as   
   problematic. Rather, the Puritans argued, singling out any day for a   
   “holiday” implied that celebrants thought of other days as less holy.   
      
   Easter, too, was singled out as a dangerous time. A Scottish   
   Presbyterian minister, Alexander Hislop, wrote a whole book about it:   
   the 1853 pamphlet The Two Babylons: The Papal Worship Proved to Be the   
   Worship of Nimrod and His Wife. Using questionable and vague sources,   
   Hislop argued that the name of Easter derived from the pagan worship   
   of the Germanic goddess Eostre, and through her the Babylonian goddess   
   Ishtar. (This claim has persisted into the present day, and is often   
   cited by those who want us to make Easter more fun and secular. Still,   
   the evidence for the existence of Eostre in any mythological system —   
   a single paragraph in the work of an English monk writing centuries   
   later — let alone actual religious links between Eostre and Easter is   
   scant at best.)   
      
   Hislop decried Easter as a pagan invention, writing: “That Christians   
   should ever think of introducing the Pagan abstinence of Lent was a   
   sign of evil; it showed how low they had sunk, and it was also a cause   
   of evil; it inevitably led to deeper degradation.” Even seemingly   
   harmless rituals — food, eggs — were signs of demonic evil: “The hot   
   cross buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter   
   Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now,” he wrote.   
   Bad history it may have been, but it made good propaganda.   
      
   What did the English Puritans, their American counterparts, and this   
   Scottish Presbyterian have in common? As the title of Hislop’s   
   pamphlet makes clear, they were all influenced by anti-Catholicism: a   
   suspicion of rituals, rites, and liturgy they decried as worryingly   
   pagan. The celebration of religious holidays was associated, for many   
   of these preachers, with two suspicious groups of people: the poor   
   (i.e., anyone whose holiday celebrations might be deemed dangerously   
   licentious or uncontrolled) and “papists.” (Of course, in England and   
   America alike, those two groups of people often overlapped.)   
   Christmas got reinvented, but Easter didn’t   
      
   So what changed? In the 19th century, Christmas, the secularized,   
   domestic “family” holiday as we know it today, was reinvented. In his   
   book, Nissenbaum goes into detail about the cultural creation of   
   Christmas as a bourgeois, “civilized,” “traditional” holiday in the   
   English-speaking world. Christmas, Nissenbaum argues, came to be   
   identified with the preservation (and celebration) of childhood.   
   Childhood itself was, of course, a relatively new concept, one linked   
   to the rise of a growing, prosperous middle class in an increasingly   
   industrialized society, in which child labor was (at least for the   
   bourgeois) no longer a necessity.   
      
   Popular writers helped create a new, tamer, model of Christmas:   
   Washington Irving’s 1822 Bracebridge Hall stories, which referenced   
   “ancient” Christmas traditions that were, in fact, Irving’s own   
   invention; Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “The Night Before   
   Christmas”; and, of course, Charles Dickens’s 1843 A Christmas Carol.   
   Nearly everything we think we know about Christmas, from the modern   
   image of Santa Claus to the Christmas tree, derives from the 19th   
   century, specifically, Protestant sources, who redeemed Christmas by   
   rendering it an appropriate, bourgeois family holiday.   
      
   But no such redemption happened for Easter. While it, too, received a   
   minor family-friendly makeover — Easter eggs, traditionally an act of   
   charity for the poor, became a treat for children — it didn’t have the   
   literary PR machine behind it that Christmas did.   
      
   Instead, its theological significance intact, Easter has maintained   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)