Overheard in the supermarket.. Re: Easter 🤣

[ItsFridayIminLoveJS]

In Sainsbury's today. Chocolate/ Easter egg isle.
Two young adults looking at Easter eggs.
One says to the other " l wish the fu**ing Government would make it's mind up about Easter and have it on the same date every year like Christmas.
( Can't educate the ignorant)🤦‍♀️🤷‍♀️🤦‍♀️🤷‍♀️

You don't need to be a Christian to understand that Easter is not always at the same time, and why on earth would it be up to the government to decide when it actually is? If they don't know that Easter is a religious festival, celebrated all around the world, and think that their government is in charge of setting the date then yes, they are ignorant.

It's not the same date all around the world. Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas Day on 7th January

Yes, of course, apologies.

Ours does, first two weeks in April so
we get lovely cheap quiet holidays every couple of years depending where it falls.

Fewer than half the population even claim to be Christian, let alone are it – many who make that claim are people I suspect Christ would find extremely dubious, if they are involved in the financial system at all, because that is most certainly based in usury, for which he seems to have had very little time. So what makes England a Christian country? The religion of the head of state?

NattyTurtle59
You do realise that Christmas Day is on the same date all around the world.

Except for the countries in which it is not 25th December, as I pointed out upthread.

Pretty well, that and history.

In terms of numbers I've no idea but its amazing the number of people who want to get married in church. Or is that all for show?

Church weddings do seem to bring out the bridezilla in people, don't they. And all to often it's about the Wedding, with the marriage that follows it hardly being considered at all, which I find sad.

(I got my figures for numbers of people who say that they are Christians from Wikipedia and I assume that got them from the census. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England )

Stick to Paganism and the OG celebrations.

Only about 15% of weddings are religious ceremonies. So not really many.

There is a difference though between a Religious holiday/event and the government decided Bank Holiday that goes with it.
Christmas Day is December 25th and is also a Bank Holiday. It's a Bank Holiday whatever the day falls on so even when Christmas Day is a Wednesday or Friday or whatever it's a day off work (obviously not everyone but you know what I mean).
So at some point the government decided that the day off will always be December 25th regardless of the day of the week.
May Day however is different. May Day is 1st of May but the government decided the Bank Holiday will always be the first Monday in May - not May 1st.
If May 1st falls on a Tuesday then the actual Bank Holiday is almost a week late.
So despite when a religious festival has a fixed date the government could decide that the "day off" date could be different.
At some point in history this decision was decided.
By the church (and their powerful influence) or the government?.

What??

What to what?

I just realised that the OP (who never came back) didn't actually say the people she overheard didn't know the reason behind why Easter is a moveable date.
She just assumed that's what the conversation was about.
They could have been vicars in training for all she knows and they were thinking how things could be easier if it was a fixed date.
I mean celebrating a Christian festival down to when the moon is out is all a bit Pagan isn't it 😂

It’s meant to be a birthday so it’s a fixed date not a fixed day like Easter (always on a Sunday, like Mother’s day).

Ramadan isn’t on the same date every year, though, and nor is Diwali.

So it’s not as if Christianity was the only culprit

‘I celebrating a Christian festival down to when the moon is out is all a bit Pagan isn't it 😂’

It’s based on Passover ( so probably not that ‘Pagan’, unless you are trying to insult Judaism). bTW, do you know what Pagan actually means .

But it's nothing to do with the Government it is a Christian festival and it's up to the Church to decide how it is set. Whitsun is also a Christian festival and it also changes each year. The Spring Bank holiday we have now is nothing to do with Whitsun.
Who do you mean when you say 'they could fix it if they wanted to?"

It was decided by the Christian Church

Yes but when Bank Holidays were invented (Victorian era?) the government would have had to make the decision if the official day off would be December 25th or the first Monday after 25th.

I thought the choice of dates was based on Eostre - the pagan spring festival.
I confess I don't know much about Passover. Apologies to anyone Jewish if I have sounded rude about the origins of Easter. I was unintended.

FWI, Easter was tagged on to Ostara the pagan festival celebrating the beginning of spring.
Ostara is a solar festival not a lunar one. It's on the vernal equinox every year. So, it you want a really traditional, old fashioned celebration go for the 20th March.

And at that time religion was taken a great deal more seriously than it has become since. So they went for the actual day, as the Established Church wanted, rather than a more-or-less adjacent one.

Scrooge was able to go to an open shop on Christmas morning to buy the Prize Turkey for the Cratchit family, so it hadn't become a recognised holiday in 1843. In fact, the very idea of a ‘bank’ holiday was introduced by Sir John Lubbock, who passed the Bank Holidays Act in 1871. The four Bank Holidays in England, Wales and Ireland that he proposed were Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August, and Boxing Day. There were to be five in Scotland: New Year’s Day, Good Friday, the first Monday in May, the first Monday in August, and Christmas Day.
Christmas Day, like Good Friday, was already traditionally given as a day off to workers in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and did not need to be included in the Act. Those two days were wrapped into the Act just for the sake of uniformity!

@AskingQuestionsAllTheTime I was just googling it - Christmas Day was (for some reason) left off the 1871 act and wasn't actually a Bank Holiday until 100 years later in 1971 😱

We were on holiday in Florida years ago and got chatting to an American couple, they said “I’m not if it’s the same for you, but it’s Easter here”…

I think there was some phrase like "a holiday of common usage" which meant it didn't need to have a special Act about it, it was simply deemed to be a holiday. I have a vague memory of people being very surprised by the need to include it in a law in 1971, because they had assumed it was a Bank Holiday already.