Rebranding religion

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It’s Easter soon, finally. The one day of the year (or one of the days anyway) you can guiltlessly gorge on Lindt bunnies, get sick on Creme Eggs, and fill your pockets with Mini Eggs. It’s all about that chocolate, am I right? Google agrees with me. After typing in ‘Easter’ on Google images, I had to scroll through seventeen rows of chocolate bunnies and ducklings to find anything resembling Christianity. But when I typed ‘the meaning of Easter,’ there were crosses and Bible verses all over the place.

Nowadays, there is this stark difference between why we do Easter and how we do it. I think Google, and perhaps most of us, struggle to remember that Easter is, at its heart, a celebration of Jesus’ resurrection. But whether it’s down to commercialisation, secularisation, or the thousands of years that have passed, if the majority of people don’t give Jesus a second thought on Easter day, then should we really be bothering to at all?

I’m a Cadbury’s girl. I can demolish a whole packet of chocolate fingers in one sitting. No joke. But when writing this I find that I keep asking myself this question: do I want to be someone who surrenders to the thin, chocolatey, hypnotising flow of commercialism, or am I someone who, regardless of belief, likes to get to the heart of things? Do I really want to allow my sweet tooth to bulldoze over my mind? Irrespective of whether or not you think that someone rose from the dead two thousand years ago, perhaps a belief that has survived that long and convinced so many people deserves to be given some thought, at least on Easter day. Before the sugar high kicks in, perhaps.

I don’t know what your Easter looks like, maybe you’ll be sneaking bites of hot cross buns underneath piles of work, or salivating over a Malteaser bunny as a revision reward, or maybe you’ll be rolling in family Easter egg hunts. Either way, enjoy the food and enjoy the tradition.