This is a load of piffle, isn't it?

[Psipsina]

We got handed a religious magazine for children yesterday by a fairly fierce looking woman.

It was nice of her to give us one however the copy is terrible, I don't know who writes it - think it's published by the Salvation Army.

This paragraph for a start:

'Chomping chocolate eggs is fun, but did you know there's a serious side to Easter eggs too? The chocolate eggshell is a symbol of the tomb where Jesus was placed after he died. Breaking through the chocolate egg represents the stone being rolled away from Jesus' tomb . And the eggs-tra treat we find inside reminds us of the joy Jesus' followers experienced when they discovered the tomb was empty, because Jesus had been brought back to life.'

That's patently not the case, or is it? I must have missed some significant bits of my religious education if it is.

Right. Passover and Easter are both movable feasts that are calculated using different calendars. Therefore sometimes it's easter first, sometimes it's passover.

If you want to know more, read this:
The two holidays are based on two different calendars. Easter is based on the solar calendar, the calendar commonly used today. In Western churches, Easter is dated as the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. It therefore occurs somewhere between March 22 and April 25. Eastern Orthodox churches have a different approach based on the lunar calendar.

Passover, on the other hand, is based on the Jewish calendar, a lunar calendar that has twelve 28-day months. Every two or three years, there is a thirteenth month called Adar II included in the calendar. Over the course of a 19-year cycle, this "extra" month occurs in the 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th, and 19th years. The year 2008 was one of those years with an extra month. Passover occurs from the 15th to the 21st of the month of Nisan - which is the month right after the "extra" month of Adar II. The inclusion of the "extra" month in the lunar calendar thus caused Passover to fall nearly 30 days after Easter in 2008.

And lo, on Sunday Jesus laid a chocolate egg.

Thanks Pipbin.