The UK’s National Secular Society is calling for the date of the Easter holiday to be fixed for the purposes of school holidays and so on. Britain’s Local Government Association agrees. The Pub Philosopher, quite rightly, does not: “Businesses, schools and universities have managed to plan around a movable Easter for years. It is, at most, a minor inconvenience. Bureaucrats, like the Local Government Association, always want to standardise things. They have a natural bias towards planning and controlling. This proposal is not aimed at improving our lives but at making the government planners’ jobs easier.
A movable Easter gives us a little unpredictability. Most of us live regimented and over-controlled lives. We have lost touch with the rhythms of the year. A four day holiday that is determined by the movements of the Sun and the Moon, reminds us that, despite our technological expertise, we are still governed by the forces of nature. It brings a little bit of chaos into our otherwise ordered world. Easter must remain a movable feast and the planners, bureaucrats and control freaks will just have to deal with it.”
And then there’s that little thing called tradition…