COMMENTARY: HUMOR: A cranky commentary on the rites of spring

c. 1996 Religion News Service (Robert Kirby is a Mormon humorist and regular columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune.) (RNS)-Now that Easter Sunday has come and gone, I can’t resist asking an impertinent question. Why on this holiest of days do Christians choose to behave like pagans? The resurrection of Jesus is a central event […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Robert Kirby is a Mormon humorist and regular columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune.)

(RNS)-Now that Easter Sunday has come and gone, I can’t resist asking an impertinent question. Why on this holiest of days do Christians choose to behave like pagans?


The resurrection of Jesus is a central event for Christians. But I’m baffled about the pagan rituals that accompany the celebration. Oh, we’ve niced them up a bit for the modern age. This far into the 20th century, it wouldn’t do to celebrate spring as pagans used to by choosing someone in the neighborhood to paint in interesting colors and stuff with barley before they slit his throat.

I’m talking about more solemn rites. Eggs. Candy. Bunnies. Gods with names like Cadbury and M&M. None of this stuff has anything to do with being a Christian, and yet it’s what we seem to value most at Easter. When it comes to worshiping idols, we’re as bad as the Druids.

Where in the Christian creed does it say that we’re supposed to get new clothes and a chocolate rabbit for Easter? Nowhere. That has nothing to do with the Resurrection, yet for many Christians this appears to be the defining characteristic of the holiday.

Once, when I was a kid, my mother made matching Easter dresses for my sisters. Worse, she also made matching bow ties for my dad, my brother and me. They were horrible orange-and-brown affairs that got me laughed at by everyone in my Sunday school class. The closest I came to honoring the Resurrection that Easter was wishing I was dead.

Despite intense indoctrination, I never believed in the Easter Bunny. Santa Claus, sure. I mean, there’s a definite Christian message in the idea that a guy will bring you everything you want if you’ll only just behave yourself and stop putting your sister’s training bra on the dog.

But the Easter Bunny was too far-fetched even for a kid who believed that a guy weighing 300 pounds could get down a furnace flue. Frankly, it’s a whole lot easier to believe that reindeer can fly than it is that a rabbit will sneak into your house and, regardless of whether or not you deserve it, hide something you don’t particularly want.

Sooner or later every kid will pause in the middle of an Easter egg hunt, look down at his basket full of hard-boiled cholesterol, and ask himself,”What the heck am I doing?” As pagan as Halloween is, it’s a better lesson in Christianity than Easter. Hell is exactly like Halloween. Lots of demonic screeching and bickering over trifles. Every kid knows in their heart of hearts that when you die, Halloween is where God sends you if you weren’t good enough for glory.

On the other hand, there are no Christian parallels in the pagan rituals of Easter. As a kid, no matter how good I was, the Easter Bunny never brought me anything I really wanted. And no matter how bad I wanted to be, there were no legitimate opportunities for it in the Easter celebration.


Unless you think it’s bad to stuff an ugly brown-and-orange bow tie in the trash when your mother isn’t looking.

MJP END KIRBY

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