Why Do We Celebrate Easter?
The reasons for celebrating Easter depend on what you believe. If you are a Christian, you celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter. If you don’t believe in Jesus as the son of God, you probably either don’t celebrate Easter at all, or you’re just in it for the chocolate. And of course, if you are an ancient German, you might be celebrating Ostara, the fertility goddess.
Easter is the most important holiday in the Christian calendar because it is a celebration of the cornerstone of the Christian faith - the resurrection of Jesus. Without the resurrection, Christians could claim that Jesus was a pretty cool guy who did some neat tricks and stuck it to “the man” every chance he got, but they couldn’t claim that he was God. And if he wasn’t God, then the rest of his life mattered very little; he was just another teacher or prophet, and his death was just another death.
But if Jesus did rise from the dead, that changes everything. If he did rise from the dead, then Christians believe that this proved his deity and validated his authority to do and say all the things he did. If Jesus really did come back to life, as Christians say, then he has effectively killed death, both his own and ours (spiritually speaking, that is). And that is why Christians celebrate Easter.
Origin of the Holiday Name and Celebrations
In many of the world’s languages, the name of the holiday more closely resembles Pesach, the Hebrew word for Passover. Passover is a Jewish holiday that is celebrated around the same time as Easter to remember the time when the Israelites escaped from slavery in Egypt. After repeated appeals to Pharaoh to free them, the story goes that God got really serious and sent a series of plagues until Pharaoh got it through his thick skull that he needed to let the Israelites go.
The last of the plagues was the death of the firstborn. The Israelites sacrificed a faultless animal and smeared its blood on their doorways, and when the angel of death saw the blood, he passed over that house, leaving everyone inside alive. In the houses without blood, the firstborn (children, livestock, rodents, flies, everything living) died.
The word for Easter is similar to the Hebrew word for Passover in many languages because Christians view the Passover as a preview of the death of Jesus, the death of Jesus as the ultimate Passover, and the resurrection life of Jesus as the ultimate freedom from slavery.
But English comes largely from German, and in German, Easter is Ostern, a word which comes from an ancient pagan celebration of Ostara, goddess of fertility. As Christian missionaries took the story of Jesus farther north, they encountered spring festivals for Ostara, whose name has about a million alternate spellings depending on region, language, dialect and time period.
These festivals took place around the same time as the Christian celebration of Jesus’ resurrection, and apparently what happened is that when Christianity was spreading throughout Europe and the cultures merged, a lot of the existing pagan traditions and celebrations were combined with the new Christian ones. That’s how we got the Easter bunny, the dyed eggs, and eventually, the chocolate. And as Old English developed, and as modern English came out of it, Ostara and her many pseudonyms turned into the word we know as Easter.
Cultural Celebration of Easter
We celebrate Easter as a culture largely because of tradition. We take our kids to see the Easter bunny, we buy new spring dresses to wear to church, we dye eggs and eat our weight in chocolate, and we do most of it without a second thought. It’s just what we do on Easter.
The reason you celebrate Easter and how you go about it is up to you. Maybe you’re excited about the death of death, maybe you’re stoked about the birth of new life, or maybe you’re just in it for the candy.