Why Easter seems less celebrated than Christmas ?

johnnywong said:

Is it because the public has less believe in resurrection or the Cross is too offensive to many?

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I thought it had to do with the number of presents expected.

Some of both, I think. Liturgical churches celebrate both Christmas and Easter in a major way, and many nonliturgical churches celebrate them as well. But when you move out into the wider culture, Christmas is more fun than Easter. Christmas has a lovely mother with her newborn baby; aren't they cute? You can talk about baby Jesus in a generically warm-fuzzy-happy way. Easter has a guy getting tortured to death, and that's really hard to work with if you're going for a generically-happy holiday.

There's also the belief difference that you mentioned. A non-Christian who doesn't believe in the Incarnation might still believe that Jesus was an influential historical person who was born in first-century Palestine, and that's enough to get something out of the religious side of Christmas. Probably only Christians are going to believe in the resurrection, though, so that's a smaller group.

I don't celebrate Easter or Christmas. I have been led by God to not celebrate them because of the pagan origins. I will either celebrate Passover or simply celebrate Christ everyday. I don't judge those who do though. However you celebrate and glorify Jesus, do so unto the Lord.

Easter is celebrated even by non-believers. It is mainstream and commercialized and not a biblical holiday. I don't think there is a reason why it's celebrated less to be honest. But maybe Saturnalia and sun god worship had more importance back in the day more so than the moon goddess of infertility Ishtar... I don't know. But either way the world is still offended by Jesus.

You are presumably a Western Christian. In the Christian East, it is most definitely the other way around.

I suspect that the fact that Easter moves in the calendar doesn't help its cause, actually.

I don't celebrate Easter or Christmas.
I think on both the coming to earth of Jesus and His resurrection all through the year.

One word: consumerism. The secular world is more easily able to exploit Christmas because of the whole gift giving aspect.

Can you guys stop giving false information about Easter?

David Cabrera said:

Can you guys stop giving false information about Easter?

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Especially the age old "Easter is Pagan" schtick.

ewq1938 said:

It's not related to where anyone lives. It's solely based upon the names

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Not really. Languages where Pascha is called 'Easter' or some variant thereof:

English, German, and a few other Germanic languages, plus a few random languages spoken by people who were clearly Christianized by English speakers.

Languages where Easter is called 'Pascha' or some variant thereof:

Greek (where we get it from), Hebrew (where the Greeks got it from), basically all the European languages except for a few members of the Slavic dialect continuum that call it Velikden or something similar (or Uskrs, if you're Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian), Amharic, Coptic, Turkish, Kazakh...pretty much everyone outside of the English-speaking world.

Then we have a few weird stragglers like Arabic or Yoruba where it's something more like "Resurrection day", and Mongolian where it is apparently (according to Google) Ulaan Ondognii Bayaryn, or "Red Egg Day".

In other words, it has nothing to do with the name unless you want to say that English, German, and Punjabi Christians are celebrating qualitatively different holidays than the rest of the Christian world.

and traditions of the two holidays.

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Yep. And the traditions are such that in the East, 'Easter' (Pascha) is the more important of the two.

p.s. - Apparently the only reason it's even called "Easter" in English and some other Germanic languages (not even all of them; look it up in Dutch) is apparently because Ostere or something similar to that was the name of a goddess among the pre-Christian English, and so she had her own month named after her, and that month is when Pascha happened to fall. Or so claimed Bede.

Y'know...kind of like how we still have several of our month names named after old pre-Christian gods, and our weekdays, too:

1 ) JANUARY - The Month of Janus, the Roman God of the gateway

2 ) FEBRUARY - The Month of Februa, the Roman Festival of Purification

3 ) MARCH - The Month of Mars, the Roman God of War

4 ) APRIL - The Month of Aprilis, which means 'opening' (of leaves and buds)

5 ) MAY - The Month of Maia, Greco-Roman Goddess of Spring and Fertility

6 ) JUNE - The Month of Juno, the principal Roman goddess

7 ) JULY - Named in honour of Roman dictator, Julius Caesar

8 ) AUGUST - Named in honour of Roman emperor, Augustus Caesar

9 ) SEPTEMBER - Named simply as 'the 7th month of the year'

10) OCTOBER - Named simply as 'the 8th month of the year'

11) NOVEMBER - Named simply as 'the 9th month of the year'

12) DECEMBER - Named simply as 'the 10th month of the year'

Have fun renaming your days of the week "first day, second day, third day, etc." like the mostly non-Christian Arabs (and surely others) do, so as to avoid their 'Pagan origins', you bunch of silly folks. Maybe it'll catch on well enough so that the rest of us won't have to hear "Easter is Pagan!" every single time anyone asks anything about it even though that's completely and utterly false. Boy, wouldn't that be sweet.

I could imagine a world wherein Evangelicals in the USA took the traditions of Lent seriously, fasted and abstained from meat for forty days in significant numbers so that there might be some sort of general cultural movement to make Easter more practiced of emphasized than Christmas.

You might even have a situation where secularists would adopt 40 days of Veganism just to counter the Christian influence, then you would perhaps get companies branding themselves as lent safe meals and trying to make a profit of it like they do for Christmas. At least more so than they already do for Easter.

Protestantism in general doesn't seem keen to take on papist ( I would say Christian) practices like Easter and there are elements within it that continue to promulgate the myth that Easter has pagan origins despite being proven wrong continuously on forums like these, year after year. This is why I'm willing to bet Easter, within our life times, doesn't become more important than Christmas.

I would actually invite Protestants to abide by the centuries old practice of fasting before Easter, it would allow us Old Christians to have one more thing in common with the the New Christians and make Christendom at least a little more united.

Many Protestants do fast during Lent.

It's just not as systematised, for us.

Paidiske said:

Many Protestants do fast during Lent.

It's just not as systematised, for us.

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I'm glad the Anglicans, (some) Reformed and Lutherans and other magisterial Protestants hold to the traditional practices.

Yet the majority of Protestants, Baptists, Evangelicals and Pentecostals don't, as I understand them.

ewq1938 said:

Easter is a pagan holiday. There is nothing Christian about it at all.

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Really? The Resurrection is "pagan?"

johnnywong said:

Is it because the public has less believe in resurrection or the Cross is too offensive to many?

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Easter is the biggest feast day in the Orthodox Church. Much bigger then Christmas.

DM25 said:

I don't celebrate Easter or Christmas. I have been led by God to not celebrate them because of the pagan origins.

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Since neither Christmas or Easter have pagan origins, I very much doubt you were led by God not to celebrate them.