All that said, we do get a four-day weekend for Easter and only two days off for Christmas (in the UK and Commonwealth countries), so one could argue from that that Easter is the more important even in the secular world...
I dunno about that, really — certainly in Australia, where I come from, and the UK, where I now live, Easter is very commercialised. Easter eggs and bunnies start appearing in the shops as soon as the Valentine's Day stuff is out, so from mid-February onwards, even when Easter isn't until mid-April. In the northern hemisphere, there's also a general "springtime" theme that's part of the non-religious version of Easter (not in the southern hemisphere, for obvious reasons). It gets into all the supermarkets and major shops everywhere. Usually no mention of the Christian meaning of the celebration, any more than there is with Christmas. If you can make it a big "spring festival" sort of thing — with lots of chocolate and rabbits and chicks and flowers and all the rest of it — you can make money out of it. I've always thought Christmas and Easter are about equally commercialised and secularised. But that needn't stop Christians from celebrating what these days are really about — and if others hold secular, pagan or other religious celebrations at the same time, that's fine by me.
