The Story of Easter

Easter stands on Jewish ground. Its oldest name is Pascha, from Pesach — Passover, the feast of the Exodus — and the Gospels place the Last Supper at a Passover table, and Jesus's death and resurrection in that festival's shadow. Christians came to see him as the Passover lamb, and the Resurrection, on the Sunday after, became the very center of the faith: the day death was outlasted.

Because the feast is timed from Passover, it's timed by the moon. After a good deal of arguing across the early Church, the Council of Nicaea settled the rule in the year 325, and the West still uses it: Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21. That's why Easter wanders anywhere from late March to late April — and it's why a page of moons and a holy day belong on the same calendar. The forty days of Lent get you ready for it, counted from Ash Wednesday (not counting Sundays) — forty, like Jesus's days in the desert. And Lent's doorway is Carnevale, which means "farewell to meat": Italy's carnival season, with Venice's masks the most famous of all, is the last big feast before the fast. Lent's rules used to forbid eggs, too, so households painted and stored them — decorated eggs are an art from Ukraine to Greece — and at Easter, the eggs came back to the table. The hare came with them: a German professor wrote down the egg-laying Osterhase in 1682, and German immigrants carried him to Pennsylvania, where he became the Easter Bunny.

In the Grove: a borrowed feast, a moon-timed Sunday, eggs hidden in the garden grass. If anybody ever told you the pagan and the holy can't share a calendar, Easter is the gentle answer. It never has been anything else.