…or Christmas either, apparently. This falls into the “learning something new every day” category, I guess. I always thought that the celebration of Christmas and Easter was a universal constant of the Christian belief system.
Yesterday, when we were delivering our monthly food boxes to an elderly Filipino couple, we wished them a happy Easter (although we don’t subscribe to any of the stories and don’t observe the event). To our surprise, they said that in the particular church they attend, Christmas and Easter are just another day, and they attach no significance to either. I think I heard the word “Unitarian” in there somewhere, but their accents are fairly heavy.
But yeah, I don’t see anything logically or theologically inconsistent with being Christian and not doing anything special to acknowledge Easter or Christmas. It’s kinda like the way birthdays and anniversaries aren’t treated as a big deal in some families, I guess.
There are other groups that are (or at least call themselves) Christian which don’t celebrate Christmas or Easter. One such are the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
There are some very strict Christians who celebrate Christmas and Easter as religious holidays but with none of the secular celebrations. My completely insane sister in law belongs to some such group. Never talked to her long enough to find out their name.
I was talking to my office-mate about this Friday. She was raised as a Seventh Day Adventist (her step father was a pastor in the church) and never celebrated any of the Christian holidays. She left the church a while back and married a guy who was raised Catholic, but who is now secular except for Christmas and Easter. She said at first it was a bit mind blowing, but she is now over the top in love with the secular trappings of the holidays that she never got to have growing up. She even liked attending Midnight Mass with her husband’s family.
Well, SOME fundamentalist Christians believe fervently in the virgin birth and the resurrection of Jesus, but STILL shun Christmas and Easter themselves as holidays that have been wholly tainted by pagan customs.
The Friends (AKA Quakers) traditionally did not celebrate Christmas, Easter, or any of those pagan-derived holidays. My dad grew up Quaker, and his parents had a Christmas tree, because, as they said, they didn’t have the guts not to have one. My mom grew up Unitarian-ish, although in reality her parents were pretty non-religious. My mom’s parents always referred to Christmas and Easter as Pagan holidays, and celebrate them as such.
I grew up going to a house church that also did not celebrate any holidays. The only thing we did was Communion, complete with foot-washing, as that is the only thing that Jesus commanded us to celebrate.
I now go to a more mainstream church that celebrates Christmas and Easter, but it still seems weird to do anything special for Christmas and Easter.
It appears that my zealous shunning of all things religious has resulted in a bit of ignorance on my part. And I never took a comparative religion class in college, either. I think I recall something about the Jovies and holidays, though. Anyhow, ignorance fought.
Some Christians believe that since Christmas and Easter aren’t in the Bible–they’re not commanded or celebrated in the text–they should not be observed. I saw one person comment that since you’re supposed to be remembering the cross all the time, you don’t need a special day for it–every day should be ‘Easter.’
(I also saw one person who was raised Church of Christ, who only celebrated the eggs/candy part and is uncomfortable with religious aspects of it–who is married to a guy who only likes the religious part and is uncomfortable with eggs and candy. They don’t do Easter very much!)
I grew up Quaker, and Easter was just another Sunday for us. I was in a PhD program in religion before I realized that it was a major holiday for people. (“Omigod, they believe he actually rose from the dead!”) We placed more emphasis on Jesus as a great spiritual teacher – thus many don’t consider Quakers “real” Christians, of course.
Although in English and German, (but not in Dutch or the Scandinavian languages), Easter takes its name from a pagan god, the celebration does not have pagan origins. In nearly every other European language, the word for the feast is a variant of the Greek word for Passover, the feast with which it is identified in various ways in the New Testament.
There actually was a bit of a fight in the early church as to whether there should be an annual celebration of the Resurrection as it was already celebrated each Sunday, with the pro-Easter crowd eventually winning. Denominations that do not celebrate it generally follow the same arguments as those who opposed an annual celebration in the first three centuries.
There is a stronger case for Christmas arising from pagan revels, but Easter arose from Christianity on its own without “converting” a pagan feast.