Easter is a curious holiday. Following 40 days of Lent, which includes the strangely appealing Palm Sunday and Ash Wednesday oddities, it is supposed to be the biggest day of the Christian year. Bonnets, egg hunts, chocolate bunnies, pastel, and all manner of rebirth are the themes yet for some reason, the holiday seems to have fallen by the wayside, trumped by even the most innocuous of holidays, President’s Day and Columbus Day. What’s up with that?

I’ve got a few theories why Easter has fallen out of fashion. One theory surmises that because the holiday floats around, sometimes in March, sometimes in April, people sort of forget about it and hence, an event that could be a big deal loses most of its pizzazz due to lack of planning. Another idea I have suggests that with Easter falling just after that most disorienting phenomenon, Daylight Savings Time, people just aren’t in the mood for holiday celebrating. And who can blame them, really? Most likely, however, the real reason Easter has lost its luster is that most of us working schlubs don’t get the holiday off, the ultimate sign that a holiday is far from upper tier. Whatever the case, one thing is crystal clear: Easter just ain’t what it used to be.

Like most people I know, I sort of missed out on Easter this year as well. Yeah, I made a ham but it wasn’t very good. Yeah, I thought about dyeing a few eggs but in the end I forgot to buy food coloring and eggs so the best I did was nothing at all. And most ridiculously, I actually did consider for a split second putting on an Easter suite and prancing through some random meadow shouting, “Jesus saves!” But of course, that, too never happened. Oh, well.

I suppose, like the masses, when a formerly great holiday comes and goes without a day off and lacking a full blitz marketing campaign, it somehow just doesn’t feel like a holiday worth celebrating. Now how shitty is that? Perhaps if Easter had the corporate backing of say a Christmas or a Halloween, undisputedly the top two of the holiday hierarchy, then maybe we’d be talking about The Easter Bunny with the same reverence as Saint Nick. But as Ice-T once said, “shit ain’t like that.” So instead of full-blown Easter feasts we get a whole lot of nothing. And that sucks.

Looking over what I’ve just written, I admit, there’s no real reason for my rant. The words have materialized merely because I always get nostalgic when a holiday rolls around, no matter how big or small. I suppose all I want from this tirade is to express a little dismay for Easter’s ever-plummeting holiday status. It’s not that getting excited for second-rate holidays over Easter is a bad thing, far from it; anything that gets a person excited is all right by me. It’s just that I wish we’d think a little bit more about why we celebrate than doing it merely because a commercial tells us that The Great Guinness Toast is an amazing event. You know what I mean? I’m not saying you need to get your Jesus on, far from it. I’m just saying that we all need to get "it" on, whatever "it" is, and when we do, we need to really mean it.