Everything You Ever Needed To Know About Easter

March came in like a lamb, bounding and bleating and eating all the grass in our yards until we got fed up and cut off all its hair to make coats because March went out like a lion, raining all over the place. March contained no holidays meriting free days off work, although, in my opinion, the release of the Watchmen movie should have been considered. If only our country was run by former comic book nerds. At least they would have the sense to understand that Bruce Wayne would make a far better Treasury Secretary than Lex Luthor.

Directly following March naturally comes April, or unnaturally comes August, but since this isn't a leap year I'm going to stick with April. April brings us the elusive holiday Easter, which falls on a different Sunday every year, ranging from the beginning of March to the end of May, given certain astrological calculations based on the positions of the stars and the mood in the air and the groundhog seeing its shadow on the day that Jesus died on the Cross. The Bible is not quite as specific about Easter as it is adamant that Christmas is to be celebrated on December 25th. Apparently two different Ancient Roman Bureaucrats were keeping records at the time.

DATE ON JESUS' BIRTH CERTIFICATE: December 25th, 0 A.D.
DATE ON JESUS' DEATH CERTIFICATE: The First Sunday Of The Third Trimester Of The Second Shepherd Moon Following The Super Bowl, Carry The Remainder, And No Less Than Six Weeks After The Groundhog Sees Its Shadow, 33 A.D.

Not much is known about Easter as it is not a highly publicized holiday. Christmas gets roughly 147 billion different songs on constant rotation everywhere you go from the beginning of August through the end of December. Christmas gets a slew of television specials and movies aired so aggressively some of them need a government mandate limiting how many times they can be shown on television each year. Easter, on the other hand, gets one song by obscure progressive rock band Marillion, a movie by Charlton Heston, and another by Mel Gibson.

I can't recall much about the Charlton Heston Easter movie except it probably had something to do with guns, or maybe apes. I do happen to remember that easily influenced Christians blamed Jews for the death of Jesus Christ because Mel Gibson's Easter movie told them to, even though the Bible explicitly states that it was all God's fault. In fact, according to the Book of Matthew, Chapter 26, Verses 39 and 40:

³⁹Then Jesus went with them to the olive grove called Gethsemane and bowed with his face to the ground, praying, "My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me."

⁴⁰God looked down and whispered "No."

In response to the outrage over his negative portrayal of Jewish people in his movie, Mel Gibson expressed his sincere regret with a drunken, anti-Semitic tirade. There's much more to Easter than the irrational hatred of Jewish people, though. There's also bunnies. Since Easter takes place in the springtime, it's been largely associated with bunnies, chickens, ducks, eggs, green pastures, blue skies, yellow sunshine, and whatever occurs in nature that can be associated with the color pink. (Strawberry Nestlé Quick?)

In the weeks leading up to Easter, parents can take advantage of the opportunity to frighten their kids by taking them to the mall and having them sit on the lap of a man in an anthropomorphic bunny costume because that is slightly less creepy of a holiday mascot than an emaciated bleeding guy in a diaper. This is the Easter Bunny. Unlike Jesus Christ, the Easter Bunny would steal chicken eggs and hide them to antagonize farmers, who would send their formidable armies of confused toddlers to retrieve them. As far as I can tell, this is the basis for the Easter tradition we still honor to this day of sending our college students to tropical paradises to have uninhibited, drunken sex for a week straight.

Most importantly, Easter is the last chance to get worthwhile holiday candy until Halloween. I highly recommend Brach's Bunny Basket Eggs. These are basically pure cane sugar packed inside hard candy shells. These are so rich that most people eat half of one and put the other half away for later, but I can eat an entire bag of these at a time because I am an advanced candy eater and have been eating candy products for so long I will probably die from diabetes before I'm 40, but that is the sacrifice Jesus was willing to make to save the world from sin.