Happy Easter - Lest you

Happy Easter - Lest you forget amid the Hallmark (TM) hype that's nearly taken the day over, today's the observed anniversary of the day Christ rose from the dead to redeem you from your sins. (I'm not going to throw in any of the usual "...as Christians believe..."-type qualifiers. If you're Jewish or Moslem, you have my personal dispensation not to bow and scrape to my sensitivities on your holy days. If you're an atheist - find you own holiday!)

Easter is one of my favorite holidays mainly for the religious experience, which has become, if anything, vastly more profound for me over the years. Christmas is Christ's birth, and itself a deeply religious holiday for me, personally. But Christmas is so deeply associated with family (still the main time we're all together), the weather (I love the cold crispness of the air I always associate with Christmas) and, since I've had children, the joy of the whole gift-giving part of the holiday, as commercial as it is. Christmas is an overload of sensations, really - religious, familial, parental, gustatory, sensory - that it leaves me fatigued, needing the (otherwise inexplicable) New Years Day break more for relaxing from Chistmas than to recover from the drinking binge I haven't gone on in over a decade.

Easter, however, is rejuvenating in a mostly spiritual sense. The weather varies (often gorgeous, sometimes deep in snow, today gray and threatening rain), the only family involved is my own, and I'm free to focus much more on the meaning of the holiday than I am for Christmas, even though my approach to Christmas is still perhaps just a bit more spiritually-centered than that of most in our society.

At any rate - whatever your faith or approach to life, I hope you find today the sense of renewal and redemption that we all need, from whatever source. And for Christians - may you all have a blessed Easter.

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