2002-04-02 11:20

Negative holiday

Negative Holiday

The University is on holiday today; after a 4-day weekend it needs an extra day to recover, apparently. I find this slightly pathetic, but I've got a key to the building so I am not obliged to care - last year I managed to take a negative number of days holiday this way.

I spent the holiday visiting my mother where I earned my board and lodging by digging flowerbeds, shifting furniture, applying teak-oil to the garden picnic table that's been there for as long as I can remember and swearing at her new scanner. I even went to a Paschal service at the local church, where I was a reluctant choirboy in my youth. I didn't recognise any parts of the Paschal service, but as it didn't feature a choir it's quite possible that I had never bothered to attend it. It involves starting in darkness and lighting candles. There are no good tunes. When I got home I checked my copy of the New English Hymnal and confirmed that there aren't any good Anglican hymns for Easter. Church-flavoured people often claim that Easter is the most important festival in the church calendar - apparently their tunesmiths missed that memo.

Meanwhile, neo-pagan flavoured people - just as risible in their own way, of course - make a lot of mileage out of the fact that even the name of Easter is derived from that of an old Germanic fertility godess whose festival just happened to be conveniently situated for a spot of cynical bricolage by the early Christians. And, while I'm all for making (purely tactical) alliances with such people for the purposes of mocking Christians and their silly middle-eastern death cult, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of evidence for this festival, or for that matter the godess - the major source is the Venerable Bede writing a century or two after the conversion of the English to Christianity.

One thing I do know, though, and I'll blog it here for safe-keeping, is how come the Orthodox churches came to have a different Easter from the western churches. Unsurprisingly, it comes down to their use of the Julian calendar for sacramental purposes. They use the same "first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox" algorithm as us (for suitable values of "us") but they take the spring equinox as being the 21st of March in the Julian calendar (which is 13 days slow, by my watch). This is, of course, spectacularly stupid even by religious standards since the vernal equinox is an astronomical event entirely independent of the calendar.

Russian Jews, however, appear to be celebrating Passover in synch with the west. So now you know.