~Whimsical Reasoning~

I love comedy, I have over five hours of it stored on my ipod. I listen to my ipod before I go to bed, and I have often been said to laugh loudly after I'm asleep. One of my favorite comedians is Jim Gaffigan. Most of his routines consist of him making fun of things in our culture that we take for granted. One of my favorite bits of his talks about the absurdity of our holiday traditions. With Easter being tomorrow, I decided to take a deeper look into these traditions, and share my opinions on holidays in general, and how we as Americans have commercialized the hell out of every holiday we can get our hands on.

Okay, so I know most everyone knows the premis of Easter, Jesus raising from the dead ect. ect. So how did we get eggs and bunnies and pastel colors from all of this? Well, as almost every Christian holdiay, we got it from someone else. Pagans are the source of almost all of these 'Christian' traditions. It amazes me how much the Christian church scorns pagans, when we copied almost everything in our religion from them, from our stories in the bible to our sacred rites, to our holiday symbols, all of these are of pagan origin. Being a daughter of a pastor, I am constantly reminded of religious day, symbols, and traditions. I also wrote a paper about similarities between religions last year for Larry's class.

See, eggs symbolize new birth, AKA, the rebirth of Jesus. The pastel colors again, are the colors of new life, spring flowers, rebirth. And the fact that Jesus is said to have rose from the dead near spring is no coincidence. Christians were big fans of replacing all things pagan with thier own twist on things. Easter is in Spring to take the place of the pagan celebrated Spring Equinox. It shows how unoriginal most religions are.

Everywhere you go, even months before any holiday, you see decorations, countless decorations. This is a huge industry in the United States, we like our holidays God dammit! You can buy anything from easter egg window decals to markers shaped like baby chicks. Why do we have these obscure items? Well, because people will buy them of course. Its like those giant stone geese you used to see on everyone's porches, the ones you could dress up. There was no real function to them, but they we 'cool' and 'in'. Some of this has to do with the Tipping Point, one person buys it, and it spreads like wildfire. If people are taught to think that they NEED easter grass to go in their children's Easter baskets, they will buy it. Human behavior is a strange thing...

More next time!

Posted in: on Saturday, March 22, 2008 at at 2:05 PM 1 comments