Easter should remain Easter

As long as I’ve been a student (coming up on twenty years now—two fucking decades, shiiit…) I’ve been blessed with holidays based around religious dates such as Easter and Christmas.

I’ve never been much of a practicing Christian but having these times of the year off were cause of great celebration, usually surrounded by intense partying (once I entered high school, anyway) and even more intense slacking off. These holidays are very holy to the people of the world; especially the students.

Throughout the early years of elementary Easter holiday was a week long departure from reality where my yet-to-develop colleagues and I would search every nook and cranny of our homes looking for chocolate eggs and VHS movies and whatever else the Easter Bunny decided to leave in our homes. Much like Christmas and Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny only left crap like that for the good children—however, I was definitely never a deserving kid and just scarfed on the chocolate before he found out I was bad and came to steal it back.

Entering high school it was just a reason to not attend class (not that I really needed one, but you know) and get drunk on a Tuesday night. It wasn’t quite as good as May long weekend, but it was still a week off from school and we took what we could get.

Now that I’m in college I get a single day off… today, “Good” Friday. I assume a lot of students around the country will be using it to study for impending finals (two weeks or so away). I, on the other hand, will be using it to exercise my drinking muscles that will see the light of day in a massive way coming up in May.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about dropping the religious names from holidays and moving to a more secular version. Like the “Spring Holiday” for Easter, or the “Winter Holiday” instead of Christmas.

I just don’t really see the point.

We’ve gotten on fine for the last century or more celebrating these dates with their respective religious names. Over time they’ve grown to lose meaning and we’ve still managed to cope. Christmas seems more of a capitalist holiday than a religious one these days, and even the religious folk have found a way to stay above ground with the whole day. It wouldn’t really matter to me what we call the day, but for some reason non-Christian families are shitting bricks in their briefs about what we call the holidays in their children’s schools.

Does it really matter? I’m writing this at 1:00 AM on Friday morning, so I don’t really have time to go out and survey a large number of the public on the question, but, I would wager if a large number of people were polled, the majority would equate the word “Christmas” more with the tradition of swapping gifts than celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.

Same goes with Easter. Ask any kid and the only thing he or she will care about is the gratuitous giving of chocolate on Easter Monday (or whatever day it is you decide to help out your kid on their race to obesity).

People need to realize that tradition is the reason we are still calling these holidays by the terms we call them. We aren’t out to promote Christianity or attack your religion by using these terms. We’re just used to it. Get over it. Celebrate it whatever way you wish. Celebrate your own religious holidays and call them whatever you want. You don’t hear Christians whining about the names of other religion’s holidays. Let the kids have some fun and relax.

Have a Happy Easter, Too Real will be back on Monday. We don't even take the extra day off... we just keep it lazy every weekend.

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