Easter Week
April 6, 2021
San Augustine, Texas. Children having an Easter egg hunt on the school grounds on the last day of school before Easter vacation in 1943 (Library of Congress)
IN 877, Alfred the Great ordered all his subjects in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom to abstain from servile labor during the week after Easter. In the seventh century, Kings Receswind and Wamba in Spain issued similar decrees, but this was not uncommon; for more than a thousand years, church and secular leaders commanded Easter joy and celebration for the entire week after Easter Day, a week which was typically filled with festivities, dramatic reenactments of the Resurrection and solemn liturgies. The faithful were considered newly sanctified and thus in need of strength against new assaults by the devil and his legions, who are steaming mad when people make spiritual progress and hatch new plans to ensnare the unwary.
Americans, despite all their material wealth, have never lived the sort of collective festivity, leisure and sacred ritual that was common during those times.
Easter week — well, it’s back to normal. A tree expert I had called a couple of weeks ago showed up at our house early yesterday morning to look at a dead limb we needed to be removed. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t make it last week,” he said. “I was sick from the vaccine.”
He was ready for a full week of work. Americans used to at least take Monday off and some schools once had even the full week after Easter off. The most important event in human history, honored to this day in every nation of the world, does not warrant much fun anymore.
Of course, this year, even Easter Day celebrations were ruined.
The Virus Taliban and their fundamentalist adherents continued to enforce the new state religion of germaphobia. They puritanically eradicated signs of social pleasure. A holiday of festive gatherings is an especial target for their decrees. They can’t stand it when people have fun!! I wouldn’t be at all surprised if masked Virus Clerics started to patrol the streets with whips, disbanding pick-up whiffle ball games and small groups of profane leisure-seekers.
Defy these fanatics and their “invisible enemy” whenever and wherever you can.
Laugh at their floating microbes. Laugh at their superstitions. Laugh at their morbid statistics. Become a criminal if you must, but please have fun. At the very least, enjoy being an infidel, you wicked, wicked sinner.
By the way, Alfred the Great ordered the non-essential workers of his day to take off the week before Easter too so they could engage in the last penitential exercises of Lent (for real sins, not phony sins). Ordinary workers were viewed by Christian kings as human beings of incomprehensible spiritual value, not robots. In Christian societies, workers had, if you count Sundays, well over a hundred mandatory days off. Leisure is good for the soul. The devil wants nothing more than societies of Calvinistic workaholics, too busy and tired to lift their spirits to higher things. He truly hates a good time.
Since you live in a post-Christian world, you have to do the second best thing and that is, cultivate a festive outlook in your own life.
