How to determine the date for Easter

You would think that setting a date for a holiday would be easy. You look on the calendar for a day when it seems convenient for everyone to take a day or two off work, and declare that this is when your holiday is going to be held. If you work for the government, you can even declare it a national holiday. All this means is that the government gets to take time off work but you don't, because you're an ordinary yutz with bills to pay.

Not so with Easter. For some reason, the Council of Nicaea decided to make it REALLY FUCKING COMPLICATED. It is so complicated that I'm going to leave it up to my readers to learn all about it here, but I will post a few of the highlights.

First, a word on the Council of Nicaea. This was a group of stodgy old guys in long cloaks, funny hats, and unstylish beards, who convened in the year 325 to determine just what, exactly, all of Christendom was supposed to believe. Like, was Jesus really the son of God, or just some guy? Should they serve fruit hors d'oeurves at communion, or is just the bread and wine okay? What color should their funny hats be? That kind of thing. And one of the things they discussed was the official date for Easter.

They decided it should always fall on a Sunday, and it would be the same Sunday all over the world, even if there was something very important and sports-related happening on the telly on that day. Then they said, "Hey, let's make it the third Sunday in April! Nothing much happens in April, anyway, right?" And that was that.

HAHAHAHAHAA! No, I'm kidding. I said they made it RFC, didn't I? Pay attention! It wasn't enough just to set it on any old random Sunday; no, it HAD to occur on a certain Sunday after a particular full moon that occurred after the vernal equinox! Not only THAT, but it isn't just the normal, everyday full moon that anyone can look at and go, "Oh, look, a full moon!" No, it's the ecclesiastical full moon! This can only be determined by looking at the very complicated flow-charts, tables, diagrams, and Power Point presentations concocted by the stodgy old hat-wearing men and revised later to accommodate the change from the Gregorian to the Julian calendar. Here is the paragraph dealing with it, from the article linked above:

The usual statement, that Easter Day is the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs next after the vernal equinox, is not a precise statement of the actual ecclesiastical rules. The full moon involved is not the astronomical Full Moon but an ecclesiastical moon (determined from tables) that keeps, more or less, in step with the astronomical Moon.

The ecclesiastical rules are:

• Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox;
• this particular ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a tabular lunation (new moon); and
• the vernal equinox is fixed as March 21.

resulting in that Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25. The Gregorian dates for the ecclesiastical full moon come from the Gregorian tables. Therefore, the civil date of Easter depends upon which tables - Gregorian or pre-Gregorian - are used. The western (Roman Catholic and Protestant) Christian churches use the Gregorian tables; many eastern (Orthodox) Christian churches use the older tables based on the Julian Calendar.

Jesus Jumpsuit-Wearing Christ!! What is it with Christians, anyway? They try so hard to convince everyone that their religion has nothing to do with pagan rites, yet here they are, figuring out their spring holy day from the date of a full moon! Doesn't seem like something an omnimax God would really care about. Like, would he smite them a mighty smote if they celebrated Easter on a Tuesday instead of a Sunday? Why would it matter at all?

Easter, of course, IS a pagan holiday, kept since very ancient times as a spring celebration on or after the spring equinox. In the past, long before modern clocks, time zones, calendars, mass crop production, and artificial lighting, people relied on the stars, sun, and moon to tell them when to plant crops, when to move their herds to different pastures, as guides for traveling, and probably a lot more. Equinoxes and solstices were therefore important times of the year for them. The spring equinox was especially important, as it marked the official end of a long, dull, cold, and dangerous winter. Animals could be let out of barns, farmers could plan when to begin sowing seeds, and people could stop freezing to death waiting for the weather to fucking warm up already.

And when I say "freeze to death," I mean it literally. There was no central heating back then; if you didn't have enough firewood to last through the winter, you died. Or you could get snowed in for weeks until you ran out of food. The return of spring was a HUGE deal. Of course people were very particular about honoring the sun and picking just the right day on which to celebrate its triumphant and glorious return--or its resurrection, if you will. Christians care about the precise date for Easter because Jesus is just another sun-based deity, dying in winter and resurrecting in the spring, again and again and again.

Don't worry, he's a god, he can handle it.