Last weekend was Easter weekend, and friends in retail tell me that customers acted far more stressed than on a normal holiday weekend. Part of it, I am sure, is that we have gotten used to three-day holiday weekends, so that the two-day weekend many of us had for Easter seemed too short. Part of it, too, must have been the tax deadline, which fell on Easter week for the first time in years. The Internal Revenue Service says that taxpayers were filing later than ever this year, and that is easy for me to believe, as I was later than ever with my own tax filings. With more people working toward deadlines, the stress of the last weekend before tax deadline must have been greater than usual.
Still the fact remains that people were stressed out about Easter. That isn’t in keeping with the meaning of the holiday, which is about the victory of light over darkness or of life over death. Based on that, it should be a happy time. At the same time, the cultural traditions of Easter are not hard to live up to. Despite the profound meaning of the holiday, there is not much to it in practice. It is a holiday observed with brief morning ceremonies, meals featuring boiled eggs, and spring colors. Even these simple details may be seen as optional, as I can attest after seeing how sparsely attended an Easter sunrise service tends to be. Granting that we are no longer a nation of chefs and that eggs annually see their highest prices with the boosted demand on the week before Easter, people still cannot be stressing out about boiled eggs. If Easter weekend is hard to do, it is the result of putting more on the holiday than is really there.
There are two cultural struggles that may weigh on Easter. There is the commercial push since 1950 to turn Easter into a commercial holiday featuring packaged candy, decorative baskets, and baked ham. Separately there is a continuing effort to turn Easter into a family holiday on a level with Thanksgiving and Mother’s Day. The foil-wrapped chocolate eggs are here to stay, I think. The family holiday angle will never get much traction, but it may be a source of angst for those who feel they are supposed to be doing more than they are.
The bigger factor, though, I think, is a sort of holiday inflation in which people try to make this year’s holiday a little bigger than last year. Mathematically, that means holidays like Easter tend to expand exponentially until something breaks. Obviously, that’s not a good strategy for everyone’s peace of mind. There is never enough time to do exponentially more. I think we need to learn to chill out and enjoy holidays again. If Easter is this much of a problem, how will people ever cope with the 4th of July or Valentine’s Day?
The answer is to approach a holiday with a sense of being good enough. If you start out feeling that you are good enough as you are and that the holiday is good enough the way you have seen it in the past, then simply meeting that tradition is good enough. Then there is no need to add extra bells and whistles to make up for whatever the imagined shortcoming of the situation is. Imagine, for example, an Easter on which merely getting a couple of decorated boiled eggs, or the egg-shaped candy substitutes, means you have arrived at the right place. If it is the traditional thing for the holiday, then it is Easter enough.
