Easter

Today was Easter Sunday and it was pretty uneventful for me. When I was a kid, Easter used to be my favorite holiday because I loved searching for Easter eggs in my backyard. I never really knew what Easter meant, other than it was the day that Christ had risen, and it was also the day that the Easter bunny came to our house. Obviously, since then a lot has changed. I now know that the Easter bunny isn’t real and coincidently, when I stopped believing he stopped coming to my house. Easter is a different type of holiday in that aspect because once you stop believing in the Easter bunny he usually stops coming. This is unlike Christmas where, Santa continues to come throughout your teenage years even though you stopped believing in him long ago.

Usually on Easter we all go to my grandmother’s house and have Easter dinner. I couldn’t go this year though because I had to work. I was okay with it though, because my family saved me a plate of food. I was a little bummed out though, because I always enjoy running around the yard with my younger cousins trying to help them find the Easter eggs.

The real point of Easter though, is to celebrate the day that Christ rose and ascended into heaven. If he wouldn’t have ascended into heaven, everything that he had preached up until that point would have meant nothing. Since he did ascend into heaven, Christians knew that they would be granted eternal life if they believed in him and what he stood for. This I would say is pretty common knowledge for any Christian, but what some Christians don’t know is how Easter was celebrated even before the word of God and Christianity had spread throughout the world. This story, takes a completely different path.

Originally, Easter was celebrated by Pagans who saw the day of feast as renewal and rebirth. The day honored the Pagan Saxon goddess Eastre. This holiday took a different turn though, when Christian missionaries traveled to England and converted the Saxons to Christianity. The day that newly converted Christians saw as renewal and rebirth happened to be around the same time as the day Jesus ascended into heaven. Due to this, they merged the two different occasions together and called it Easter. Easter was still a time of renewal and rebirth, but was no longer associated with any Pagan Gods, but rather with Jesus.