Evan’s Insight: Easter Sunday

Evans Insight: Easter Sunday

Evan Rebhorn, Writer

Easter has been apart of many families’ yearly traditions for thousands of years now, as it is celebrated annually on the first Sunday of April. While almost everyone goes to church for an Easter service, some families do different activities for Easter, such as brunch at a restaurant, Easter Egg hunting, visiting relatives, etc. Everyone who celebrates Easter does something special for the holiday, but are the fun activities that partake during the holiday possibly distracting us from the true meaning behind Easter?

Like most holidays, there’s bound to be some sort of saturation by the media, like how Christmas is always commercialized with presents and gifts, and Valentine’s Day is commercialized with tacky gift cards and chocolate hearts. With Easter, it’s more or less the same thing. When most people think of Easter nowadays, they most likely are thinking of Easter Eggs, the Easter bunny, or candy baskets. Now of course, all of this is fine for the most part. Who doesn’t think of that kind of stuff when holidays comes to mind? It’s perfectly normal for people to indulge in the more commercial sides of the holidays for the fun sake of it. However, there becomes a problem once those things are prioritized over the deeper meaning behind the holidays, because then any substance or importance the holiday once had is thrown away for something much cheaper and unimportant. It’s important to remember the reasons to why we celebrate the things that we do, so we can always remember the sacrifices made by those (especially Jesus) in the past that have helped us get to where we are now, and I feel like that’s something that’s missing from our world today.

A way that we can help ourselves to avoid letting Easter become saturated is to keep the story of the crucifixion and Jesus’ rise from death alive. Just like people during Christmas preach about Jesus’s birth to help people understand why we celebrate Christmas, if we do the same things for Easter, it will surely never be made irrelevant or lose its meaning. Even with the fun activities, Easter isn’t special without the story that made it possible.