How Christmas conquered Easter

By Daniel Deagler

If Christmas were all you knew about Christianity, how much would you know? The honest answer has to be: not much.

You would know that something special was going on - something special that was just beginning to unfold. But the accounts of Christmas in the Gospels are thin. The Nativity is mentioned in only two of the four canonical gospels, Matthew and Luke, and though these biblical accounts are beautiful and wondrous, they tell us almost nothing about the faith.

If Easter were all you knew about Christianity, how much would you know? Well, you might not know everything, but you would have a solid idea of what Christianity is all about. Within the Christian faith, Easter dwarfs Christmas in significance.

Yet it is Christmas that dominates the culture. The holiday changes the attitude and behavior of not just Christians, and not just Westerners, but people all over the world.

Why? One reason is that the seriousness of Easter inoculates it against excessive trivialization.

Christmas is joyous and lighthearted. Easter may be joyous - the Resurrection certainly is - but it's also deadly serious. For Christians, the days leading up to Easter are the most solemn and somber of the year.

Lent and Advent have some similarities as the preparatory periods for Easter and Christmas, respectively. But even among the devout, Advent entails a lot of shopping and decorating. The fasting and prayer prescribed for Lent are observed more often in the abstract than in fact, but nobody's hanging off ladders and putting up blinking lights.

Another reason for the rise of Christmas is the agricultural cycle. Christmas' development into a bacchanalia can be traced partly to the time of year. In December, as Stephen Nissenbaum relates in The Battle for Christmas, "The deep freeze of midwinter had not yet set in; the work of gathering the harvest and preparing it for winter was done; and there was plenty of newly fermented beer or wine as well as meat from freshly slaughtered animals - meat that had to be consumed before it spoiled." In December, the table would have been set for a party even if it weren't Christmastime.

The Bible says nothing about when Christ was born. Thus, the celebration of the Nativity was scheduled rather arbitrarily. Dec. 25 conveniently supplanted the Roman festivals of Saturnalia and Sol Invictus, as well as the Teutonic Yule. The spirit of those long-ago winter-solstice celebrations is a big part of the modern Christmas holiday.

Easter, on the other hand, is always in the spring, when food was traditionally scarce. The main reason ham became central to the traditional Easter meal (along with spring lamb) is that it's smoked. Without this curing process, the meat would have spoiled long beforehand.

The name for the holiday we call Easter, incidentally, is in many languages derived from the Hebrew Pesach, or Passover, which is when the Crucifixion is said to have taken place. But our Easter and the German Ostern are from the Anglo-Saxon Eostre. According to St. Bede, the Germanic month Eostur-monath, named for a pagan goddess, was the equivalent of April and so became the term for the Easter season. The Germans who settled in Pennsylvania brought their Easter customs to America, including the Osterhase, or Easter hare, and dyed eggs.

In Orthodox Christianity, Easter celebrations are a little bigger than in the West, and Christmas celebrations are a little smaller. Maybe they have the proportions more correct than other Christians do.

There is a small irony to this, because more than anything else, what made Western Christmas the 800-pound gorilla of holidays was the embellished reputation of one of their guys - a fourth-century Greek bishop who lived in Anatolia (now Turkey) and went by the name of Nicholas.

And no Osterhase can compete with Santa Claus.