Holiday has rich cultural meaning for millions of our people
Palm Sunday is a holiday that signals the coming end of Lent and commemmorates the final entrance of Jesus Christ into Jerusalam, where he was greeted by throngs of people waving palm-fronds. Palm Sunday is an important day in Christian theology, as it led directly to Christ’s crucifixion (Good Friday) and resurrection (Easter Day). While many white people no longer believe in the religion, the faith was very important to countless generations and the Easter season was a major event that has accrued a number of very rich cultural elements, both Christian and pre-Christian. As symbols of white history, holidays like Easter have been attacked consistently, and many racially-aware people are reviving an interest in such customs for themselves and their families.
Indeed, the Easter season has much deeper roots within our collective unconscious than the Christian faith alone. The season was celebrated by our pre-Christian ancestors as a period of rebirth, much as Christians do. The name “Easter” comes from Eostre, a mysterious Anglo-Saxon Goddess. Suprisingly, not much is known about her, the only source being the Venerable Bede, a monk and chronicler. The famous folklorist Jakob Grimm believed that she was called Ostara in German-speaking lands. The idea of Spring, fertility and new life is seen in other symbols associated with the season, such as the hot-cross buns, stamped with a “sunwheel” showing the coming of Spring. Easter bunnies and eggs likewise stand for new life, and eggs were also sacred to the Greek Orphic pagans.
Easter’s connection to the calendar underlines the pre-Christian roots of the holiday, and such computations served a vital economic role for our preindustrial foreparents. Planting and reaping all depended on exact calculations, and so religious holidays helped to determine the course of the seasons in everyday life. The fact that clergy represented the intellectual class for the bulk of our existence highlights the importance of such events. The date for Easter is determined by computus — Latin for “computations” — and is based on astronomical, not theological, considerations. Since the Gregorian Calendar was adopted in 1582, Western churches have had a slightly different date for Easter than many Eastern Orthodox churches, who retain the Julian Calendar. However, in 2007 the dates coincide.
Easter is dated from the Spring Equinox, and the computus is quite complicated, showing the intellectual sophistication of the religious establishment which preserved classical learning, founded the university system, defended the West from Islamic invasion, and provided a key element of Western self-awareness for generations.
Culturally speaking, the Easter season is a rich opening for parents to educate their children about their priceless shared history. Especially for white children who are taught in school and thanks to the mass media that whiteness is “boring” and is not “cool,” seasons like Easter are a chance to explicitly head off the demoralization and self-hatred before they take root.
Ukrainian Easter eggs (Pysanky) are world-renowned for their beauty and deep layers of symbolism: each figure painted on such an egg holds a different message. (Such eggs are also popular in other Slavic lands). Hot cross buns, usually eaten for breakfast on Good Friday especially, were used as evil-thwarting charms, symbols of the light of the sun defeating darkness. Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter, was the date of the Last Supper, and historically kings and other rulers would wash the feet of the people on that day. It is a day to express humility, much as Palm Sunday is observed in Italy, where people resolve long-standing disputes.
Fig pudding and fig pie is the special dessert on Palm Sunday in England, where the day is also known as Fig Sunday. Figs stand for fertility in European esoteric symbolism. Greeks eat fish on the day; the fish predates the cross as an early Christian symbol, with the Greek word for fish, ICTHS, meaning Jesus Christ, son of God, savior. The fish, representing the esoteric element of water, is also a symbol of sacrifice, holding as it does a place “between heaven and earth.”
Welsh people call Easter Day Sul y Blodau — Flowering Sunday. The Welsh national flower, the daffodil, is a symbol of the rising sun.
Germans decorate poles with streamers and flowers for Easter, the poles being related to male generative powers.
In many parts of Southern and Eastern Europe, the Holy Saturday before Easter Sunday is filled with the smell of cooking as people prepare special dishes for the feast to come.
The dawn services of Easter Day in many churches are again reflective of the general solar aspect of the season. In England people climb local hills to greet the new day, while the “Easter bonnet” is reflected in the custom of wearing new clothes — again, the idea of new life springs eternal.
Easter Monday is a day of games — soccer in England, and egg shackling, knocking hardboiled eggs together, across the European-derived world.