Because Easter never became a great secular holiday like Christmas

Editor’s note, April 6, 2026, 6 am ET: This story was originally published on March 29, 2018, and we’re revisiting it this Easter.

Christians from a variety of traditions will celebrate Easter this Sunday. Easter commemorates the resurrection of Jesus Christ after his crucifixion. For many Christians, including those of Eastern Orthodox traditions (who generally celebrate Easter later than Western Christians, as they use a different calendar), Easter is the most important Christian holiday of all.

But in North America and Europe, Easter has diminished cultural force as a time for secular celebration—its broader cultural cachet barely approaches that of Christmas. As the Jesuit priest and writer James Martin wrote ironically for Slate, “Sending hundreds of Easter cards this year? Attending too many Easter parties? … Tired of those endless Easter-themed specials on television? I didn’t think about it.”

So why no do we celebrate Easter like we do Christmas? The answer tells us as much about America’s religious and social history as it does about the holiday. It reveals how America’s holiday “traditions” as we now conceive of them are a far more recent and politically charged invention than one might expect.

The Puritans were not fans of holidays

Christmas and Easter were roughly equal in cultural importance for most of Christian history. But the Puritans who made up the preponderance of the first American settlers opposed the holidays in general. Echoing an attitude shared by the English Puritans, who had come to short-lived political power in the 17th century under Oliver Cromwell, they described Christmas and Easter as times of silliness, drunkenness and revelry.

Cotton Mather, among New England’s best-known preachers, lamented how “the feast of Christ’s Nativity is spent in feasting, gambling, carding, masquerading, and in every licentious liberty…for mad mirth, for long meals, for hard drinking, for lewd games, for rude amusements!” As historian Stephen Nissenbaum wrote in The Battle of Christmas“Christmas was a season of “misrule” a time when ordinary behavioral restrictions could be violated with impunity.“

Like other holidays (like the pre-Lent holiday we now call Mardi Gras), Christmas was a dangerous time in which social codes could be violated and social hierarchies disrupted. (Among the practices that the Puritans opposed was the popularity of the “Lord of Misrule”, a commoner allowed to preside as “king” over the festivities in the noble houses for the day.)

The very nature of having a vacation, moreover, was seen as problematic. Rather, the Puritans argued, sobbing any day for a “holiday” implied that the celebrants think of other days as less holy.

Easter, too, was classified as a dangerous time. A Scottish Presbyterian minister, Alexander Hislophe wrote a whole book about it: the 1853 pamphlet The two Babylons: The papal cult was shown to be the cult of Nimrod and his wife. Using questionable and vague sources, Hislop argued that the name Easter derived from the pagan cult of the Germanic goddess Eostre, and through her the Babylonian goddess Ishtar. (This statement has persisted to this day, and is often mentioned by those who want to make Easter more fun and secular. However, the evidence for the existence of Eostre in any mythological system – a single paragraph in the work of an English monk writing centuries later – let alone the actual religious links between Eostre and Easter is little at best.)

Hislop denounced Easter as a pagan invention, writing: “That Christians should think the introduction of the pagan abstinence of Lent was a sign of evil; it showed how far they had sunk, and it was also a cause of evil; it inevitably led to a deeper degradation.” Even seemingly harmless rituals – food, eggs – were signs of demonic evil: “The hot cross buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Easter or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites as now,” he wrote. A bad story it may have been, but it made for good propaganda.

What did the English Puritans, their American counterparts and this Scottish Presbyterian have in common? As the title of Hislop’s pamphlet is clear, they were all influenced by anti-Catholicism: a suspicion of rituals, rites and liturgy that they described as disturbingly pagan. The celebration of religious holidays was associated, for many of these preachers, with two groups of suspect people: the poor (that is, anyone whose holiday celebrations could be considered dangerously licentious or uncontrolled) and “papists.” (Of course, in England and America, these two groups of people often overlap).

Christmas has been reinvented, but Easter has not

So what changed? In the 19th century, Christmas, the secularized, domestic “family” holiday as we know it today, was reinvented. In his book, Nissenbaum goes into detail about the cultural creation of Christmas as a bourgeois, “civilized,” “traditional” holiday in the English-speaking world. Christmas, Nissenbaum argues, has come to be identified with the preservation (and celebration) of childhood. Childhood itself was, of course, a relatively new concept, linked to the rise of a growing and prosperous middle class in an increasingly industrialized society, in which child labor (at least for the bourgeois) was no longer a necessity.

Popular writers helped create a new, tamer, Christmas model: Washington Irving’s 1822 Bracebridge Hall stories, which referred to “old-fashioned” Christmas traditions that were, in fact, Irving’s own invention; Clement Clarke Moore’s 1822 poem “The Night Before Christmas”; and, of course, Charles Dickens’ 1843 A Christmas Carol. Almost everything we think we know about Christmas, from the modern image of Santa Claus to the Christmas tree, derives from nineteenth century, in particular, Protestant sources, which redeemed Christmas by making it a suitable bourgeois family holiday.

But no such redemption happened for Easter. Although he also received a minor change for the family – Easter eggs, traditionally an act of charity for the poor, became a treaty for children – it didn’t have the literary PR machine behind it that Christmas did.

Instead, its theological meaning intact, Easter has maintained its status as a religious holiday and – Easter bunny and eggs aside – largely avoided any wider cultural proliferation. A study by the historian Mark Connelly found that at the dawn of the 19th century, English books referred to the two more or less the same. By the 1860s, references to Easter were half that of Christmas, a trend that only continued. In 2000, Christmas was mentioned almost four times more often than Easter. Today, Christmas is a federal holiday in the United States, as the next weekday should Christmas fall on a weekend. But “Easter Monday” gets no such treatment.

Christmas is more natural for a secular holiday than Easter

The reason that Christmas, rather than Easter, became the “cultural Christian” holiday may be prosaic. Tobin Grant of Religion News Service suggests that the need for something frivolous to break the monotony and the cold weather made the Christmas season, instead of early spring, the ideal time for a period of celebration.

Or it can be theological. Christmas, with its celebration of the birth of a child, is a natural fit for a secularized celebration. Dogmatic Christians and casual semi-believers alike can agree that Jesus Christ, divine or not, was probably a person whose birth was worth celebrating. Plus, the theme makes it ideal for a child-centered party. The centrality of the family in the image of Christmas – the scene of the Nativity, pictures of the Madonna and child – allows you to “translate” easily into a holiday centered on children and childhood.

But the message of Easter, that of a grown man who was horribly killed, only to rise from the dead, is much more difficult to secularize. Celebrating Easter requires celebrating something as miraculous as it is he can’t be reduced, as Christmas can, to a heart story of motherhood; its supernatural elements are exposed front and center. It is a story of death and resurrection.

But the same qualities that make Easter so difficult to secularize are also what make it so profound. As Matthew Gambino writes at CatholicPhilly.com“This (paradox) is why I love Easter much more than Christmas. This mobile spring festival celebrates not the beginning of the life of the man of God, but the conquest of his suffering and ours. Easter marks the transcendence of death, the road that leads beyond this life to eternity with the Father.”

Christmas as we know it today in the English-speaking world is, for better or worse, tied to broader cultural ideas about family and a specifically Victorian, Protestant iteration of “middle-class values.” But the mystery of Easter remains strange, profound, and – for some – off-putting. But as the debate about the “meaning of Christmas” rages, it is nice to have a party, at least, where the meaning is clear.