All the Rage #42

Happy Easter, everyone. Or does anyone even care?

Of course, the non-Christians in the crowd will be nonplussed, but I'd argue many of the Christians in the crowd wouldn't care, either. And yet, if I said "Happy Holidays" or even "Merry Christmas" to anyone in the world around December 23, I wager I'd get a smile and a pleasant response, whether I was speaking to a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim. I walk around saying "Happy Easter" and people just look at me weird. Which makes it basically like any other day of the year.

As I write this, it's Good Friday. Two thousand years ago, they just strapped Christ onto a cross, if you believe the whole Bible thing, that is. I'm at work, as are all my co-workers, and I'm cranking some Elvis Costello. That's a socially acceptable thing to do on Good Friday--but on Christmas Day, as we celebrate Jesus being born in a manger, the world nearly shuts down completely. You try getting a pint of milk or a fifth of JD on Christmas. Good luck.

There's a bit of a twist in the prioritization of Christmas over Easter, and it bears some examination. Christmas has become the most secular religious holiday in the world. We send Christmas cards, we sing Christmas songs, we give Christmas presents. By "we," I don't even necessarily just mean Christians, because plenty of atheists and agnostics join in the fun too.

What's the deal with Easter? Yeah, there's the Bunny and baskets, but they're not nearly as prevalent a tradition as the Christmas tree. And there are no Easter pop songs to speak of, though I would think an enterprising songwriter could make a lot from the whole "resurrection" angle of the holiday, and that's even aside from the obvious allegories to the male member. (I can hear the inevitable AC/DC single in my head..."Jesus is risin'--BAWNAWBAWNAWNAWNAW--Just like I am--BAWNAWNAWBAWNAWNAW!" Rockin'.)

So Christmas is the big religious draw, the ultimate pop expression of a lingering religious awareness, and Easter's bupkus. Nothing. If you're Christian, maybe you go to church; if you're not, you sleep in. No big parades, no football games, no special movies (anymore, that is, since ABC decided to move their yearly screening of The Ten Commandments to the week before).

That's a shame. Easter's got much more drama and intrigue than Christmas could ever claim. Sure, Christmas has that whole "Jesus is born, the angels sing, yaddayaddayadda" angle going for it. Big deal, I say.

Every Easter, you get three days of big, sweeping drama. You got Judas the betrayer, Peter the denyer (is that a word?), Pontius Pilate the reluctant condemner, the centurion who figures it all out too late ("Surely this man was the son of God..." which I prefer to hear as read by John Wayne in The Greatest Story Ever Told), and at the center of it all, the fact that Jesus has to die to save his people. He dies so that we may live. "There is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends," as John wrote in his gospel. Which is really the ultimate Christian act, one to which all of us Christians should technically be aspiring to in our every breath. Of course, we rarely make it, but I'm sure some of us try, which I hope counts for something.

I guess people don't want religious drama in their holidays. They want the feel-good happy story, which is essentially what Christmas is. You can get into how cute baby Jesus is without having to contemplate him hanging on a cross, staring at all his bones. That's fine, but it really misses the point, because without the death, Christ's life means nothing.

Maybe that's why I've always preferred Easter to Christmas. Christmas is the happy first act, and Easter is the resolution. Give me the dramatic denoument over the bright, starry beginning anyday. Of course, you need both or neither has any power, but I'll take the end, thanks.

It's not really a religious issue for me, either, which is more a flaw in my personal faith expression than it is any cultural issue. And I'm not trying to examine this as a religious issue, though my prose may have veered that way in this column. I guess I just wish that our culture could embrace the complex redemption of Christianity as easily as it embraces the simple opening stanzas of its story.

So even though it's not as big a catchphrase as "ho ho ho" or "Merry Christmas," happy Easter anyway.