Happy Easter, for those of you who celebrate the Spring Equinox with a festival to Anglo Saxon goddess Eostre.
Oh, wait, sorry, my bad. That's the pagan holiday that was absorbed by the early Christians for their holiday celebrating resurrection of Jesus.
Anyway, this ties nicely into the book I just finished, Holy Blood, Holy Grail - you know, the one that the guy who wrote "The Da Vinci Code", um, borrowed his ideas from?
Well, yeah, I know that lots of it has been proven as a hoax recently, but still, I really enjoyed the last three chapters about Jesus, his life, and what was included and excluded in the Bible (mostly by a dude named Irenaeus).
Anyway, the formation of Easter can be traced back to 325 AD and Emperor Constantine with his First Council of Nicaea which is also when Christianity voted that Jesus was a god, and not a mortal prophet. (Muslims believe that Jesus, along with Noah, Abraham, Moses and Muhammad are all prophets).
Anyway, Constantine really did a number on early Christianity, as he also worshipped Sol Invictus, a pagan sun god. In fact, in 321 Constantine decreed the day of the sun (Sunday) as a day of rest, up until that point Christians had rested on the Sabbath (Saturday) like other prominent religions at the time. And that's why we have Sunday off in most parts of the world.
So yeah, Easter. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox. It always falls between March 22 and April 25.
You know what also falls in betwix those two days? Yep. My birthday.
Thus not only do I share my birthday with my Father-in-Law, I also have shared it with Easter not once, but twice - 1986 and 1997.
But because of the lunar nature of the holiday, we won't celebrate Easter on March 30 again until 2059, 2070 and 2081. Those would be my 83rd, 94th and 105th birthdays.
Oddly enough, I just found out this weekend that one of my good friends from elementary, middle and high school, Holly, just had a baby girl on my birthday. So now I have someone else to share it with!
Congrats!
(Oh, yeah, we had a great trip down the coast this weekend, look for photos tomorrow.) |
