Easter FAQ - A Guide for Newcomers

Introduction

I work with people from around the world (generally via videoconference). Those who are overseas, or only recently moved here, are often unfamiliar with American traditions. For example, when I joined a meeting early and was chatting with a native-born colleague about Groundhog Day, a foreign-born colleague joined a little late and struggled to come up to speed. Flummoxed by phrases like “Punxsutawney Phil,” he asked, “Are you guys talking about football?”

With Easter Sunday coming up, I figured I’d try to provide a handy guide, in the time-honored format of Frequently Asked Questions, for anyone similarly mystified by this admittedly rather complicated holiday.

(No, I’m not really an Easter expert, but maybe it’s better that way; I’ll be less inclined to overestimate how much people already know.)

Easter Sunday Frequently Asked Questions

What is Easter all about?

Easter is a fundamentally a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, though non-Christians in the West often celebrate it as a basic festival, more in the spirit of springtime, a seasonal renewal. In America, as with so many traditions, it can seem like mainly an excuse to eat food that is bad for us.

When is Easter celebrated?

Easter is always on a Sunday, but where the specific date is concerned things get complicated. The holiday takes place anywhere between late March and late April, based on a complex algorithm that people have bickered about for hundreds of years. To this day, different Christian denominations celebrate it on different days. According to Wikipedia, the West celebrates Easter “on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which is the first full moon on or after 21 March (a fixed approximation of the March equinox).” So this year in America, it’s this coming Sunday, March 31. That said, the Greek Orthodox church won’t celebrate it until May 5. So, if you’re late getting a card in the mail, you’ve got your excuse!

Wait a second – if Jesus was resurrected on a specific day, why does the commemoration date depend on moon cycles?

I have always assumed this moon-phase-after-equinox thing was an attempt to move in on the pagans’ action and have the holiday compete with their traditional seasonal celebrations (like how Christmas is conveniently close to the Winter solstice, and my birthday is very close to the Summer solstice). (Yes, that last bit was a joke.) But my theory doesn’t appear to be correct; Wikipedia (which has a very long article about the date of Easter) declares, “The complexity of the algorithm arises because of the desire to associate the date of Easter with the date of the Jewish feast of Passover which, Christians believe, is when Jesus was crucified.” I like that: “the desire.” Whose desire? They don’t say. I don’t suspect very many people actually care how Easter relates to Passover, much less to any astronomical matters. It’s not like if we were out for a night walk anyone would ever say, “Wait a second, how can it be Easter tomorrow? Look at the moon! Does that look like a last quarter moon to you?!”

How is Easter celebrated?

Many Catholics observe various days during Holy Week (the week before Easter), leading up to Good Friday (celebrating the death by crucifixion of Jesus and no, I have no idea why it’s called “Good” Friday). On the night before Easter, some attend an all-night vigil, as I did once at a Greek Orthodox church as the guest of a friend. I had to stand the whole time because, as a relative heathen, I didn’t want to take up one of the coveted seats in the pews. I had been instructed by my friend that the vigil would end in the morning with special music and then the Paschal greeting, aka Easter Acclamation, whereby everybody would turn to his or her neighbor and say, “Christ is risen!” to which the traditional response is, “He is risen indeed!” At some point I forgot how I was supposed to respond, and sweated over it the rest of the night … I had one line to deliver—was I really gonna flub it? As the sleep deprivation got to me, I started worrying that I’d blurt out something like, “Amen, of course, yes,” or “Word up,” or “And also with you.” In the event, I didn’t actually choke … I probably took a cue from everyone else, and/or my response was indistinct among the hundreds of people talking at once.

Religious traditions aside, almost everyone tends to eat chocolate eggs and jelly beans on Easter, and to dye hard boiled eggs, and to have a special dinner, often something really tasty like lamb. And there’s lots of talk about, and pictorial representations of, the Easter Bunny, who’s kind of like a furry animal Santa.

What’s up with the eggs? Is that something Jesus was into?

If you really want to go down a rabbit hole (sorry, couldn’t resist), try googling “did Jesus like eggs.” One article says definitely yes, but I couldn’t get any details due to a paywall. A PETA site says Jesus certainly didn’t eat eggs and you shouldn’t either. Mostly the results are dead ends. I think it’s fair to conclude that the Easter egg has more to do with basic symbolism. Wikipedia says that in the Christian tradition, the eggs “symbolize the empty tomb of Jesus.” The Encyclopedia Britannica says that early Christians repurposed some existing symbolism from pagans who “viewed eggs as a symbol of the regeneration that comes with springtime.”

Does the Easter Bunny actually lay the Easter eggs? In other words, is she of the special order of mammals called monotremes, like the platypus?

I had to do a little research on this one. I can find no evidence that the Easter Bunny actually lays these eggs (even according to the folklore and modern traditions), nor that the Easter Bunny is even female. According to Wikipedia, “In ancient times, it was widely believed (as by Pliny, Plutarch, Philostratus, and Aelian) that the hare was a hermaphrodite.” Can a hermaphrodite lay eggs? Well, sort of, but more in the sense of sperm + eggs, not the kind of egg that has a shell and thus can represent an empty tomb.

Meanwhile, both Wikepedia and Britannica mention that eating eggs is forbidden during the Lenten period before Easter, but nobody tells the hens to stop laying, so the ensuing glut is part of why eggs figure in to Easter. So I think it’s fair to say these Easter eggs are chicken eggs, not rabbit eggs. In my family’s case, my kids were never nosy enough to ask where the Easter Bunny gets the eggs, so I didn’t have to make anything up. Perhaps that’s unfortunate; I’d have liked to work monotremic mammals into our family lore.

Why are the Easter eggs dyed?

According to Wikipedia, eggs were originally dyed red to symbolize “the blood of Christ, shed at his crucifixion.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps other colors were brought in to make the holiday more pleasant. Can you imagine how the notions of bloodshed + egg + Easter Bunny might get jumbled up in a young child’s imagination in alarming ways?

Easter egg hunts seem to be a big part of the tradition. Who (supposedly) hides the eggs?

I think the folklore around who hides the eggs will naturally vary from family to family. My wife and I didn’t like the idea of an outdoor Easter egg hunt, for reasons of hygiene, but also couldn’t be bothered to create any mythology around the Easter Bunny sliding down the chimney or some other explanation for how he or she would get in to the house, which we lock up like a citadel. Plus, the hunt was always for the eggs that the kids themselves had dyed, so to pretend the Easter Bunny hid them would have been a real stretch. So my wife and I were candid about being the hiders of the eggs.

According to this article, quoting Lizette Larson-Miller, a professor with the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, “We know that Martin Luther had Easter egg hunts where the men hid the eggs for the women and children and it probably has this connection back to this idea of eggs being the tomb.” I don’t think this aspect of the Easter tradition has survived to modern times.

My kids ultimately became too competitive around the Easter egg hunts, which took most of the fun out of it, so my wife and I turned the tables and had the kids hide the eggs for us. This became a real challenge because their hiding places were so devious, some eggs wouldn’t turn up for several weeks.

That photo at the top of this post is so weird. Is it typical of the holiday?

It’s part of an entire series of strange photos my dad took of my brothers and me with our eggs one year. We never saw the photos until decades later, after his death, because he always shot slide film and almost never did slide shows, owing to his clunky projector and his workaholism. Going through his stuff (so I could sell his house), I found boxes and boxes of slides, I mean like thousands, with this series among them. Check out this choice shot:

That kid looks really stressed. What’s going on there?

My brothers and I weren’t used to our dad paying much attention to us, and couldn’t figure out the odd posing of these photos. I suspect this kid, who is either Bryan or Geoff, was just kind of flummoxed, like “Who is this weird dad guy?” and/or was afraid of letting the old man down by not posing properly.

Why do those eggs say ‘Mommy Day’ on them? Is that part of Easter?

No, mommies are not celebrated as part of Easter; modern cultures have Mother’s Day for that. Who knows what this kid was thinking. Perhaps he was somehow conflating the two holidays due to sheer ignorance. It’s natural he wouldn’t have used the word “Mother” because we were afraid of it … we could only say “Mommy.” We were even more afraid of the word “Father” and could only say “Daddy.” I once said “Dad” because I was about to get spanked for a childish infraction and was trying to be as casual as possible so I said, “Sorry, Dad,” which seemed to fan the flames of his anger such that it was one of the worst spankings I ever had. To make matters worse, when my brothers later mocked me about the spanking (which mocking went on for many weeks), their chorus was always “Sorry, Dad.” Thus, nobody said “Dad” for at least ten more years. But I realize I’m getting way off into the weeds here. I want to emphasize that our family was not normal and our eggs and the way we’ve posed with them are not representative of any Easter tradition.

How did the Easter holiday come to incorporate candy instead of just chicken eggs and a big feast?

According to Wikipedia, “as many people give up sweets as their Lenten sacrifice, individuals enjoy them at Easter.” There’s probably some truth to this, but since a majority of Americans don’t observe Lent, this part of the observance is probably related more to: hey, candy! Yum!

As with most American traditions, the theme of excess is well represented by our Easter holiday. The number of candies and their size have increased significantly in my lifetime. No longer are we limited to egg-shaped chocolates; now we have bunny-shaped chocolates that one day will probably grow to be life-sized. In America, we have a word for this indulgence. We call it: freedom.

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Leap Years & Leap Seconds

Introduction

Tomorrow is the start of a leap year.  What does this mean, besides the obvious bit about there being a February 29?  Why do we observe leap year?  What folk traditions surround this?  What is a bissextile year?  What practical matters does the leap year introduce?  Is “Leap Year” a good movie?  What is a leap second?  I will answer all these questions, and more, in this post.

A helpful mnemonic

You probably already know this by heart, but here’s a handy mnemonic for keeping track of the number of days in each month: 

30 days hath September, April, June, and November.  All the rest have 31, except for February, which usually has 28 but has 29 on leap years, which occur every four years unless the year is divisible by 100 but not by 400, a distinction we make to account for the slight rounding error that occurs by counting each year as 365.25 days when it’s actually 36.24; by skipping leap years on turns of the century that are not divisible by 400, the Gregorian calendar is able to compensate for the 11 minute loss of accuracy each year.

From a completely self-serving standpoint, we could probably dispense with leap years, since the drift in the calendar would take several generations to really foul things up.  But is that really the kind of world we want to leave to our grandchildren’s grandchildren?

Are you looking for an easy way to tell if it’s a leap year?  They tend to coincide with Presidential elections.  But you have to be a bit careful:  even though 2000 was a leap year (being divisible by 400), 2100 won’t be.  If you’re lucky enough to be alive in 2100, you’ll have to keep that in mind.

Folk traditions around leap year

According to Wikipedia, “In Ireland and Britain, it is a tradition that women may propose marriage only in leap years....  Supposedly, a 1288 law by Queen Margaret of Scotland (then age five and living in Norway), required that fines be levied if a marriage proposal was refused by the man; compensation was deemed to be a pair of leather gloves, a single rose, £1 and a kiss.”

There’s just so much to react to here!  First of all, it puts me at ease about the upcoming American Presidential election.  Scotland is in pretty decent shape, as far as I can tell, despite having once been ruled by a five-year-old who wasn’t shy about pushing through sweeping legislation.  So, whoever wins our next election, how badly could he or she really screw things up?

Personally, I’d like to bring back this leap year marriage proposal law.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that men are the only ones allowed to propose marriage in this day and age.  Yes, the prevailing tradition is still for the man to pop the question and present the ring, but he wouldn’t do so without some kind of tacit advance consent, unless he’s a fool.  In other words, the thinking man won’t propose to his sweetheart unless he’s quite sure she’ll say yes.  In this way, the woman is actually holding the cards.  (Of course you could mix & match the pronouns around all you want here.)

The part of that law I like, though, is the compensation the man must provide when turning down a proposal.  To bring back that law would create jobs, or at least create income for a daring woman.  She could find some schmuck who doesn’t seem her type, then do everything in her power to alienate him, and then propose, just so she could collect her gloves, flower, money, and kiss.  Sure, £1 isn’t much money today, but adjusting for the inflation since 1288, it would be a considerable sum.

You may be wondering:  is courtship the aspect of leap year that introduces the term “bissextile”?  Well, I hate to break it to you, but this term isn’t nearly as racy as you’d think.  “Bissextile year” is just another term for leap year.

Is “Leap Year” a good movie?

I’ll be honest with you, I never much cared for doing research, but this blog sometimes demands it.  When that happens, I’ll always prefer a popular video over some thick book.  Thus, I was pleased to see that the third Google hit on “leap year” was a movie by the same name.  Better yet, “Leap Year” stars Amy Adams, whom I enjoyed watching in “Junebug,” “American Hustle,” and “Big Eyes.” 

Alas, my hopes fell when I went to IMDb and saw the Metascore for “Leap Year” ... 33 out of 100, one of the lowest scores I’ve ever seen.  (Consider that “Star Wars:  Episode I – The Phantom Menace” got a 51.)  I scanned the highlights from various critics:  “A by-the-numbers romantic comedy as predictable as it is cloying,” “Virtually every word and plot turn is insincere, manufactured, unfelt and dishonest,” “Mostly awful,” “It’s unclear what Amy Adams did to deserve Leap Year,” “Using Love to Shed Pounds and Boost Confidence in School,” “A retread of just about every rom-com cliché ever turned,” and—wait!  What was that bit about using love to shed pounds?  Oh, an ad crept in there.  Geez.

Looking for any shred of silver lining, I consulted the IMDb Parents Guide:  “No sex scenes. A woman is briefly seen in her underwear.  There is a short fight scene, but it is not very frightening, and could even be considered comical.”  I think when the viewer can’t tell for sure if a movie scene was meant to be funny, that movie is automatically in trouble.

What does leap year mean to me?

At first glance, it would seem that as long as we avoid the movie “Leap Year,” we won’t be materially affected by there being 366 days in 2016.  That said, the following leap year, 2020, is going to cause me some heartbreak.  You see, I have this great wall calendar commemorating the 50th anniversary of my dearly departed favorite restaurant of all time, and though it’s a 2009 calendar, all the days of the week are the same between 2009 and 2015.  Thus, I got to enjoy the use of it all year long (it’s hanging out in the garage).  I was hoping to use it again six years from now, but leap year gets in the way.

How does leap year interfere?  Well, here’s the thing.  Normally, the day of the week on which January 1 falls will change by one day each year.  The year 2013 started on a Tuesday, 2014 started on a Wednesday, 2015 started on a Thursday, 2016 will start on a Friday, etc.  The term “leap year” derives from the fact that a day of the week is “leapt over” during a leap year.  That is, instead of 2017 starting on a Saturday, it will leap over Saturday and start on Sunday (owing to the extra day in February).

If it weren’t for leap year, we could reuse our wall calendars every seven years, meaning I could re-hang my La Fiesta calendar in 2022.  Leap years make it more complicated.  Because 2012 was a leap year, and skipped over a weekday, I got to use my 2009 calendar again this year (2015 instead of 2016)—so I saved a year.  Does that mean I’ll get to use it again in another six years?  Well, 2016 being a leap year will speed things along, like 2012 did.  But 2020 is also a leap year, so 2021 will leap over Thursday and land on Friday.  That means I won’t get to use this calendar again until 2026!

Not only will this require me to be more organized, but for a whole decade I’ll have to keep that calendar from being “disappeared” by my wife.  This will be a bit like secreting a war refugee in my attic, because my wife is the polar opposite of a hoarder.  For example, if my younger daughter stops playing with a stuffed animal or toy for any period of time, it goes to this purgatory area in the closet for a few weeks before being given to the Goodwill.  Whenever I’m at home I have to be careful to keep moving, lest my wife drag me out to the curb with the garbage and recycling.

What is a leap second?

My family, I’m proud to say, is a bunch of nerds.  Tonight, for example, my brother Bryan will entertain guests at a New Year’s gathering by giving a short lecture, including a demo, on the slide rule.  Similarly, on Christmas Eve, my wife gathered the kids and me in the living room to hear her read aloud from a speech titled “Pericles, in a Deathless Funeral Oration, Sums Up the Glory That Was Athens,” written in 430 B.C.  (I found the speech enjoyable, even the part where my kids burst out laughing because I was snoring.  Later in the speech I got confused about whether I’d heard the word “turban” or “turbine,” and apparently I talked in my sleep because this got another big laugh.  Neither word actually appears in the speech; I’d dreamt it.)

Furthering my family’s nerd cred is the exchange of e-mails we’ve had about leap years. I sent out the handy mnemonic that started this blog post, and my older daughter offhandedly asked, in reference to the rounding error that makes leap year necessary, “Yikes... couldn’t they just fix the rounding error in the first place?”  This question may have been rhetorical, but my dad provided a very thorough answer, explaining that it isn’t exactly right to say we make a rounding error by calling a year 365.25 days when it’s actually 365.24.  The truth is more complicated than that:  

“The mnemonic has 97 leap days per 400 years, so instead of a simple 365.25 days per year (which it would be if there were 100 every 400) the current calendar gives 365 97/400 or 365.2425.  The actual number of days per one year, from measurements, is a bit different, and wanders a little from year to year, unpredictably [due to tides slowing down the earth’s rotation, and the cycle of water freezing and thawing, which brings about changes related to conservation of angular momentum].  So to keep our civil clocks in match with the much more regular rhythm of the standard atomic clocks, ‘they’ add a leap second sometimes.  This has been necessary 26 times since 1972, the most recent being at time 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 60 seconds on June 30 of this year.  That minute had 61 seconds!”

My niece chimed in, recalling how excited her dad (i.e., my brother Bryan), had gotten about the last leap second.  She asked the other e-mail recipients, “I’m curious, ‘mathletes,’ how you’d calculate when to add the next leap second.”  This, too, elicited a very detailed and math-infused answer from her grandpa, which began, “Interestingly, it is not just a question of math, but one of exacting observational astronomy.  Oh, there is some math involved, but it is quite straightforward.  And there is a decision to make:  what is a ‘socially acceptable’ time to insert (or delete?) the second.  Midnight on June 30 is the very middle of the calendar year, a seemingly reasonable time to adjust the clocks.”

The explanation went on from here and involved meridian transit telescopes, measurements taken at a very  specific time of day, the effect of the Earth’s rotational precession (i.e., of the fact that it wobbles) on when equinoxes occur, and a bunch of other stuff I don’t really understand.  I wasn’t about to tackle the math involved, but was intrigued by the “socially acceptable” aspect of the leap second, and the friction that inevitably results when scientists present their findings to those who turn them into public policy.

Reading up on the leap second on Wikipedia, I discovered (not surprisingly) that politics does influence the leap second’s implementation (more on that in a minute).  I also discovered some other interesting tidbits, such as this:  “Muslim scholars, including al-Biruni in 1000, subdivided the mean solar day into 24 equinoctial hours, each of which was subdivided sexagesimally, that is into the units of minute, second, third, fourth and fifth, creating the modern second as 1⁄60 of 1⁄60 of 1⁄24 = 1⁄86400 of the mean solar day in the process.”  

I’m guessing that if Donald Trump were to become President, some cabinet member who happened to read up on leap seconds could approach him with the fact that it was Muslim scholars who defined the method by which we subdivide our days, and drop the name “al-Biruni” a bunch of times, and Trump would immediately want to take the USA off of the 24-hour, 60-minute, 60-second standard.  (Never mind that the sexagesimal system originated with the Sumerians and Babylonians.) 

Why would anybody want to open this can of worms?  Well, if we were to adopt a decimal basis for measuring time (as feasible an alternative to the current scheme as any, and probably easy to sell to The Donald), this might be a nifty back-door into finally getting the US into the metric system, albeit a modified version that uses base-10 for everything, including time.

I was also interested to read, on the Wikipedia leap second page, about problems that the leap second has caused with computer systems, due to its six-month notification not being enough time for developers to prepare:  “A number of organizations reported problems caused by flawed software following the June 30, 2012 leap second....  Despite the publicity given to the 2015 leap second, Internet network failures occurred due to the vulnerability of at least one class of router.  Also, interruptions of around 40 minutes duration occurred with Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple’s music streaming series Beats 1.” 

That list reads like a “who’s who” of needless time-wasting Internet social media and passive entertainment platforms, doesn’t it?  I think that instead of abolishing the leap second, or getting developers to step up their game in preparing, we should create a national holiday around the post-leap-second outage, where for forty minutes after each leap second, people engage in offline, timeless activities like face-to-face socializing, reading books, and maybe venturing outdoors.  (Presumably this interruption will begin at 23:59:60 UTC, which would be 15:59:60 Pacific, a perfect time for a stroll.)

I was similarly intrigued to learn that Google, never one to be pushed around by governing bodies or consortiums like the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, has their own scheme for handling the leap second:  “Instead of inserting a leap second at the end of the day, Google servers implement a leap smear, extending seconds slightly over a time window prior to the leap second.”  I’m not sure exactly what to make of this workaround, other than to note that “leap smear” would be a good name for a rock band.

And on that note, I wish you a happy, healthy, and rockin’ 2016!

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