Agnostic Easter

** note: this post is not meant to be offensive or to poke fun at any religion. **

Visit this post for a refresher on my (lack of) religious perspective.

When you think about secular-turned-religious-based holidays that have a relatively permanent place in secular society, Christmas is the most obvious one that comes to mind. Christmas is easy to explain away to a non-christian - it's about celebrating the birthday of a VIP. We can share in the celebration by making it about family, togetherness, and giving to others. I honestly hadn't given any thought at all to the Easter season until I received a note from daycare saying that they're collecting cottage cheese containers to make Easter baskets. Baby C isn't quite old enough to understand what an Easter basket is, and I'm guessing that most christian children his age won't be able to understand what the season is celebrating, either, but at some point we're going to have to figure out a way to talk about Easter and the Easter Bunny.

When Baby C is old enough, we plan to tell him about Passover and Easter. Actually, we hope to have someone who is more well-versed in the major religions tell him AND us about them. That's all a given. Then I told C that I also planned to tell him about the other traditions of Easter - the pagan origins, the spring equinox, the celebration of spring and fertility and rebirth and all that jazz. I had to laugh at his response:

Don't you think that would be too confusing? Too hard to explain?

Really? Explaining that it was a celebration of the transition from winter to spring is more complicated than explaining that there was some guy who died and then rose from the dead? Besides, what do the secular traditions (eggs, rabbits, flowers, chocolates) have to do with the religious sentiments, anyway? And once he sees his first zombie movie, just forget about it.

Thankfully we have a long way to go before we get to that bridge.