How Easter Day Comes About

Christians around the world celebrate Jesus Christ's resurrection from the dead three days after his crucifixion on Easter Day. Consequently, Easter is the most sacred of all holy days in the Christian calendar.

As a matter of fact, Easter is also the name of an ancient Saxon festival and of the pagan goddess of spring and off-spring, Eastre. Due to the supreme authority the church in ancient history, the ancient Saxon festival was transformed into the solemn and sacred Christian service.

During the second century, the early Christian missionaries were faced with many heathen religious festivals and ceremonies. Rather than interfering too strongly with such established traditions, they chose to, often ingeniously, attempt to convert those practices into ceremonies that were in line with Christian teachings.

The practical reason for doing that was to avoid persecution. You see, in those early days, Christians partaking in a Christian event, on a day when others were not celebrating, were easy persecution targets. On the other hand, if a Christian event was held on the same day as the established traditional ones, plus if the events were made to be as similar as possible, persecution became less likely and there were many opportunities to make new converts.

The established centuries-old festival to Eastre was celebrated at the start of spring. That, coincidentally, was the time that Christians celebrated the Resurrection of Chris. As a result, the observance of the Resurrection of Christ was subsumed under the protective rubric Eastre. That also saved many Christians' lives. Eastre was later spelt as Easter.

Initially, and for several decades, Easter was celebrated on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Subsequently, Emperor Constantine issued the so-called Easter rule: Easter should be celebrated on the "first Sunday after the full moon on or after the vernal equinox." Therefore, Easter is astronomically bound never to fall earlier than March 22^nd or later than April 25^th.