So over the last few days I’ve been pretty much inundated with Easter imagery and I imagine most of you have been too. If you’re a spiritual person you’ve probably associated it with a lot of new life imagery. If you’re secular I imagine you still associate this time of year with eggs and chicks, flowers and gardens, and the good old Easter Bunny. At least if you’re up here in the Northern Hemisphere you do.
But then I realized, wait a minute. South of the equator, it would be closer to what we consider fall, wouldn’t it? I mean, I’m sure all the Easter celebrations still take place today but wouldn’t it feel more like our late September/early October? Wouldn’t they see a lot more harvest-y type things rather than the spring-y stuff we’re used to? I guess what I’m asking is what’s the imagery associated with Easter like down in, say Argentina or Brazil or southern Africa or Australia?
(…strange the things your brain drifts off to this time of year…)
The rest of the English speaking world, including Australia, calls this season “autumn”. It’s autumn here now, in Australia, and a great relief it is after a long hot summer.
Like Xmas, we’ve pretty much imported the imagery of the northern hemisphere without really adapting it to this half of the planet. All I can say is, having lived here my entire life, celebrating a midwinter festival in the middle of summer and celebrating the start of spring at the start of autumn seems completely normal to me. It just is what it is, nobody freaks out about it.
Happy Easter to you too. It sounds like you are assuming that all folks in the Northern Hemisphere or in the US are Christians.
I grew up following a lot of religious traditions : Hindu, Christian etc. and I personally define myself as spiritual without being religious. And I associate this time of the year with Holi - the festival of colors - not Easter.
Well, I don’t celebrate Easter either but I do feel inundated with its imagery, as the OP, suggests, so I’m with the OP on this one. I don’t think the OP assumes everyone is Christian, but that we all see commercials, TV shows, church signage, school holidays etc.
It’s a good question! Interesting thought about celebrating renewal as fall begins.
Not Christian but Easter is a very chocolate-y holiday, not to mention peeps, so I’ll gladly do this part. Hard to miss all the candy-ness in every store.
So, you really think all the egg, bunny, and chick-themed candy and decorations as well as baskets full of goodies for little boys and girls are there for Holi?
If so, Holi’s the same thing as easter (a celebration of spring and the renewal of life), just with a different name, which puts you in the spiritual category.
If not, than you’d fall into the second category of thinking of that stuff as just a marketing trend, like back-to-school sales.
Just because you don’t celebrate a holiday doesn’t stop it from happening. It just makes the celebrations a purely social event/phenomenon (manamana)
I went to Catholic school in Australia. We were taught that it’s a celebration of new life, and I remember springtime imagery was mentioned. We also have the Easter bunny, despite rabbits being generally considered a pest here.
Rabbits and eggs are symbols of fertility unrelated to Christianity and being a pest has nothing to do with it. Easter and its timing was artificially created by Christians to co-opt a pagan festival and overpower old mythology with new mythology.
It’s odd, I was just pointing out to my (American) husband that Easter is kind of a bigger deal in Australia than here in California. For one thing, it’s a four day weekend (Good Friday and Easter Monday off work) and schools are closed. All of the bakeries and supermarkets make hot cross buns, or sometimes “not cross” buns (same food, no symbols), for the easily offended. And supermarkets are stacked with chocolate eggs and rabbits, which start making their appearance just after the Christmas stuff is removed. It’s not unusual for a whole aisle to be given over to Eastery paraphernalia.
Australia is a much more overtly secular country than the US, even here in the liberal Bay Area, so it’s curious such a religious holiday is so accepted. I think one possible explanation is our lack of other “candy holidays” - (almost) no Halloween, limited Valentines day. So it’s a good excuse for kids to consume sugar.
It’s a 4-day weekend in South Africa too, we get inundated with chocolate (Lindt bunnies FTW), and hot cross buns and pickled fish are common (although you can get them year-round nowadays)
Aussies celebrate Easter much in the same way as Christmas, an excuse to get the family together etc. From my American friends here it seems the closest analogy would be Thanksgiving.