March 22.] EASTER DAY.
March 22.]
EASTER DAY.
Easter, the anniversary of our Lord’s Resurrection from the dead, is one of the three great festivals of the Christian year—the other two being Christmas and Whitsuntide. From the earliest period of Christianity down to the present day, it has always been celebrated by believers with the greatest joy, and accounted the queen of festivals. In primitive times it was usual for Christians to salute each other on the morning of this day by exclaiming, ‘Christ is risen;’ to which the person saluted replied, ‘Christ is risen indeed,’ or else, ‘And hath appeared unto Simon’—a custom still retained in the Greek Church.
The term Easter is derived, as some suppose, from Eostre,[30] the name of a Saxon deity, whose feast was celebrated every year in the spring, about the same time as the Christian festival—the name being retained when the character of the feast was changed, or, as others suppose, from Oster, which signifies rising. If the latter supposition be correct, Easter is in name, as well as reality, the feast of the Resurrection.—Book of Days, vol. i. p. 423; see Med. Ævi Kalend. vol. ii. p. 100.
[30] Eostre is perhaps a corruption of Astarte, the name under which the Assyrians, Babylonians, Phœnicians, and the most ancient nations of the east worshipped the moon, in like manner as they adored the sun, under the name of Baal.
In former times it was customary to make presents of gloves at Easter. In Bishop Hall’s Virgidemarium, 1598, iv. 5, allusion is made to this custom.
“For Easter gloves, or for a Shrovetide hen,
Which bought to give, he takes to sell again.”
It was an old custom for the barbers to come and shave the parishioners in the churchyard on Sundays and high festivals (at Easter, etc.,) before matins, which liberty was retained by a particular inhibition of Richard Flemmyng, Bishop of Lincoln, A.D. 1422.—Time’s Telescope, 1826, p. 73.
Allusion is made by Mr. Fosbroke (British Monachism, 1843, p. 56) to a custom in the thirteenth century of seizing all ecclesiastics who walked abroad between Easter and Pentecost, because the Apostles were seized by the Jews after Christ’s Passion, and making them purchase their liberty by money.
The custom of eating a “gammon at Easter,” says Aubrey (which is still kept up in many parts of England), was founded on this, viz., to show their abhorrence of Judaism at that solemn commemoration of our Lord’s Resurrection. Of late years the practice of decorating churches with flowers on this festival has been much revived.