America needs better Easter mascot

Has observing the true religious meaning of holidays become a thing of the past?

Officially, Easter — commonly known as the holiest day of the Christian liturgical year — is the recognition of Jesus’ Resurrection. In addition, Easter is also celebrated through the use of a spectacularly sneaky Easter bunny that hides delectable eggs all throughout lawns and gardens.

And the use of a candy-giving bunny to detract from the greatest day in human history is strange in more ways than one.

It’s comical to consider how a rabbit could have anything to do with eggs. Don’t get me wrong — I absolutely loved the Easter bunny as a child, even though I never got a chance to spot him. But the real thing to consider is why a bunny was chosen at all.

A more sensible approach would have been the use of a benevolent candy-bringing bird, or at least something that could actually produce eggs to begin with. Even a slithery snake could be a believable Easter mascot, despite the fact that a sweet and goofy Easter bunny is less likely to terrify small children than a beady-eyed reptile.

But, as with the sleigh-riding, treasure-toting figure of Santa Claus, the inclusion of a popularized comedic figure into a once-religious holiday has only served to detract from the importance of the Easter season. A time when families should be coming together to remember the cost of their freedom from sin has slowly but surely eroded into chocolate-eating contests and egg-painting parties.

Now, we wake up to a basket of candy — maybe a small present, if you’re lucky — and a local Easter egg hunt in which hundreds of kids ignorantly celebrate the glorification of a rascally rabbit.

Eggs, bunnies and miraculous birds aside, the Christian community should be actively seeking to reign in a holiday that has slipped through our collective fingertips and into the realm of pop culture.

A natural theme of the Easter season is a new beginning, a fresh start. In recognition of this, a growing number of Christian have taken up the month of Lent, a practice in which a person gives something up for 40 days in recognition of the fasting of Jesus in the wilderness.

In this way, Lent is the spiritual precursor to Easter and is a time of penance and fasting to ready Christians for the celebration of Christ’s sacrifice, as well as his victory over sin and death.

But many people misunderstand the point of Lent, or don’t want to take into consideration its purpose to stimulate spiritual and personal growth.

According to an article in the NY Times, the season of Lent itself is based on a “wilderness” — the one in which Jesus fasted for 40 days after his baptism.

An article by Dr. James L. Wilson in Thoughts About God said, “Back in the 1880s Nietzsche declared that ‘God is dead,’ and before the turn of the 20th Century, Shaw and Wells chimed in saying the 20th Century would mark the end of the world’s ‘religious phase.’”

To this, Wilson responded: “Nearly half of the United States’ population attends worship on a regular basis while revival is sweeping through Latin America and Christianity grows behind China’s iron curtain” — a fact that proves religion is far from dead.

It is important for us as Christians to uphold the true cause for celebration this Easter. There’s nothing morally repugnant about painting eggs or getting candy, of course. But there is something wrong if we fail to go to church and remember the powerful, earth-shattering story of Christ’s ultimate victory.

In the meantime, though, we should still consider petitioning for a more appropriate Easter mascot.