Happy Easter

Easter is famously the "movable feast" of Christianity. "Movable" here means not adjustable according to convenience, but rather falling on variable dates due to quirks of calendar systems versus the celestial dance of earth, sun and moon. There are other variable holy days, but they are all anchored around the date of Easter.

Most of my life I've know the simple version of the rule:

Easter is observed on the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox.

The date had to be fixed to the Jewish lunar calandar, since, depending on which canonical Christian Gospel you read, Jesus was crucified on or about the Jewish Passover. Easter follows this date, by "three days."

Mr. Deity:

"So, uhm, yeah. That's obviously the downside. But, you know, after three days we bring you back to life, and from that point on, it's a slam dunk.

"Three days I gotta be down, sir?

"You know I said three days in the prophesies, but, um, you know there's fudge room. We could put you down late Friday, all Saturday, and then, you know, raise you up at the crack of dawn Sunday. So, thirty-six hours, tops? Thirty-five if we did on the weekend that they set the clocks forward.

But a little research showed this simple rule to be followed with mind-boggling complexity. I had no idea. Talk about angels and pinheads - I'm awestruck with how esoteric the machinations of the religious can become. And adults take all this quite seriously.

The vernal equinox is given a fixed date of March 21st. While the actual celestial equinox will vary by a couple of days due to the punctuated adjustments of the calendar (leap years, and skipped leap years).

The "full moon" referred to here, adopted from the Jewish lunar calendar, is not the actual astronomical event you'll see displayed in the sidebar. Rather it is a calculated date called the "ecclesiastical full moon," that may or may not align with the physical event. The Western church tradition (led by the Catholics) uses the Gregorian calendar to calculate all this and the Eastern Orthodox churches use the older Julian calendar. The result is that there are different Easters between, say, Catholics and the Greek Orthodox. Here in the U.S., the "secular Easter," as much as it can be said to exist, follows the Western tradition.

This year, the two happen to fall on the same date.

Earlier at Dirty John Bonny:
Easter-egg body-paint butts.
Chocolate bunnies.