My dearest hearts,
Around this time of year we start celebrating Easter / Passover / The resurrection of our Lord (you pick the appropriate name according to your culture and heritage). Sometimes this celebration falls in March, sometimes in April and sometimes even in May. Sometimes the Catholic celebration comes at the same time with the Orthodox one (quite rarely) and sometimes they are world's apart... like this year! So coming from an Orthodox background into my new family, Catholic, I will celebrate both - more goodies for me! I am a fan of eggs so I'm happy with this arrangement... not sure if my liver agrees though ;)) Joking aside, this celebration has become more and more commercial over the years. If you tell me what the connection between the Easter bunny and the eggs vs. the resurrection of Jesus, I will give you a gift! As usual, when people switched from pagan beliefs to Christianity it was easier to assimilate certain traditions in order to make the newly Christian believers more comfortable. Hence the egg was said to be the symbol of life and the bunny... oh, well I still haven't figured out the bunny part yet!
Easter time, nowdays, is all about going to church to bless the food and then knocking oneself over by overeating... especially after fasting for a long period of time. Kids get "
easter eggs" made out of chocolate and "
easter bunnies" made put of chocolate as well... they get presents and they have a break from school, yet if you ask them they hardly ever can tell you what this day really means. What do we celebrate during easter time?
Did you know that the modern English term Easter, cognate with modern German Ostern, developed from an Old English word that usually appears in the form Ēastrun, Ēastre or Ēostre. The most widely accepted theory of the origin of the term is that it is derived from the name of a goddess mentioned by the 7th to 8th-century English monk Bede, who wrote that Ēosturmōnaþ (Old English 'Month of Ēostre', translated in Bede's time as "Paschal month") was an English month, corresponding to April, which he says "was once called after a goddess of theirs named Ēostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month". There you have it! So what do we truly celebrate?
Have we returned to being pagans again? Of course it's acceptable nowdays to have some amount of commercialism in our main holidays/celebrations: at Christmas time we have Santa Claus and at Easter time we have the Easter bunny. Of course, we NEED the Easter bunny to deliver the Easter eggs just like Santa Claus delivers the Christmas presents; thus deviating from the real celebration of Christmas = birth of Christ and Easter = resurrection of Christ. It's funny, but as I write this on my android phone, Christ keeps being replaced by autocorrect with Christmas...
this phone is doing what we all began to do in our minds and hearts. Replacing the real celebration with fake, makeup, commercial ideas. A mass audience that does not think for itself will be always easier to rule and control! Now I ask of you to stop a moment and think about it... what do you celebrate today
? Do you celebrate the gift that God gave you, the gift of eternal life, or do you celebrate the power of money. I make the same mistakes as you do, but sometimes I awake from this "matrix" and think about things... the things we don't need and the things that burden our life's.
I want to take a moment today to thank God that he sacrificed his only Son so we would be free. So we would all have eternal life. I always contradict my husband when he says that he will love me until death do us part - love has no ending so I will love him even after death, as I believe in life after.
What do you celebrate today? Do you celebrate the pagan Easter or do you celebrate the gift that God gave us? Do you plan on feasting away on chocolate and goodies, not giving this idea a thought or will you tell your loved ones about it? Either way, I wish you all a very nice time with your family and the ones you love. May you have an amazing Resurrection Day!
Yours sincerely,
The Twisted Red LadyBug that sometimes celebrates Easter, because she forgets about its true meaning
