EASTER

Although Easter represents the central celebration of the Christian faith, the United States lacks deep-rooted Easter traditions, despite Christianity's imprint. Appropriately, in a country that has led the world in commerce, the marketplace shaped Easter into a national holiday using a combination of Old World religious and folk symbols. Yet while the marketplace helped secularize the holiday, it also spread Easter's religious observance and provided Americans with new opportunities for social expression and interaction.

In antebellum America, Puritans and later evangelicals such as Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists suppressed Easter and other traditional festivals. For them, the Bible's failure to mention either Easter or Christmas celebrations suggested the pagan origins of both. More important, these Sabbatarians viewed the Easter season's lengthy liturgical calendar as a threat to systematic industry and piety. Nevertheless, parochial celebrations of Easter persisted among minority denominations such as Lutherans, Moravians, Episcopalians, and Roman Catholics. Not until decades after the Civil War did a nationally recognized holiday emerge from a bricolage of merchandizing, Protestant genteel culture, and localized folk customs.

Resistance to celebrating Easter gradually eroded as the expanding American marketplace catered to the genteel quest for romantic escape. Victorians dusted off and tamed traditional holidays as family-centered festivities. Even in the early development of Easter as an American holiday, the marketplace, churches, and consumers interacted to create a celebration. Ironically, churches promoted Easter's secularization and commercialization by adopting marketing techniques to boost attendance, retain membership, or meet the need for Easter celebration stimulated by the market. Churches with few liturgical Easter traditions added floral decorations in high church style, and distributed flowers, cards, candy, or novelties to parishioners and Sunday-school children.

The Easter parade provides an example of market-church symbiosis that grew into an American Easter trademark. The parade emerged in mid-nineteenth-century New York with a throng of churchgoers strolling along Fifth Avenue to view floral decorations in houses of worship. By late in the century, after merchants combined promotion of spring styles with Easter, the procession evolved into a fashion parade with spectators arriving from out of town. New York's annual event became a model for similar parades in Boston, Philadelphia, and smaller towns and cities. While for many years it served as a middle- and upper-class pageant for social display, the creation of mass markets democratized the parade by the mid-twentieth century. As portrayed by Irving Berlin's 1948 film Easter Parade, which depicted an Easter buying spree with a backdrop featuring a cathedral, aspiring working-class women also paraded by that time.

If churches could help promote commercialization of the holiday, commerce could spread the holiday's religious as well as secular observance. By the 1880s, store window dressers employed Christian symbols such as floral crosses or religious banners to sell Easter-related goods, and some department stores created cathedral-like shopping concourses with Christian iconography. Yet often merchants combined religious images with customs that originated elsewhere and sometimes took on a sacred aura (even the Easter lily was introduced in the 1880s from Bermuda by an enterprising florist). Within a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, American merchandizing had transformed locally employed folk symbols of spring—including colored eggs, bunnies, chicks, and lambs—into standard emblems of American Easter by using their images for advertising, candies, cakes, toys, and knickknacks. Early German immigrants, for example, brought the tradition of coloring, hiding, and exchanging eggs as well as the legend of the eggproducing Easter bunny. Commercial promotion of egg dyes and egg-shaped candies spread the custom of children's Easter "nests," egg hunts, and later, baskets in America. Early in the twentieth century, the Easter bunny rivaled the egg as an Easter symbol through its ubiquitous appearance as a confection, toy, and as a seasonal counterpart to Santa later when toy departments featured a costumed "Easter bunny." Similarly, the White House egg roll, also based on Germanic custom, became like the Easter parade an annual event on America's festive calendar when publicized in the nationalizing culture after its inaugural in 1878.

Since more than a century ago, critics have charged that commerce not only revived pagan spring symbols at the expense of the religious, but also revived the pagan festival itself by transforming a Christian commemoration of self-sacrifice and suffering into an orgy of self-indulgence. But at the same time, merchandizing created new social opportunities by expanding the popularity of the holiday. For instance, although relegated to managing the home when Easter emerged, women shaped the holiday as consumers. Unempowering though the Easter parade may have been, it enabled women to momentarily break through gender strictures and move from the periphery to the center of public life. By buying and exchanging Easter cards and goods, they shifted the celebration from church to family and friends. Activities such as coloring and hiding eggs, or filling baskets with candy and gifts, transformed Easter into a family-centered holiday. Easter offered parents harried in the modern world another opportunity to bond with children.

In the early twenty-first century, the Easter celebration reflected contemporary America's atomization and corresponding segmented markets instead of class-based or mass markets of the past. Class might have been gone, but so was the blurring between the religious and secular in national life. Religious themes disappeared from Easter in public culture, due not only to secularization but also to the decline of large denominations and the rise of independent evangelical churches. In national marketing, Easter dissolved into a spring festival where folk symbols abounded in Easter candy (such as ubiquitous yellow marshmallow "peeps"), the Easter bunny at malls, and fashions designated as "spring" rather than "Easter."

Ironically, Easter flourished at the local level as it did before the market nationalized the holiday. Many festivities suggested the segmented marketing trend toward individual self-fulfillment as well as consumer self-indulgence. New York's Easter Parade, for example, devolved into a spring frolic of costumed revelers; donating blood at Easter, a practice loaded with both Christian and pagan symbolism, became an Easter tradition for some Americans; and decorating lawns and trees with plastic eggs, an ersatz revival of a German folk custom, grew in popularity.

Among churches, community organizations, and families, customary activities such as passion plays, sunrise observances, egg hunts, and egg collecting mixed indiscriminately with commerce as they did in premodern times. Christian retailing, with outlets commonly found in local churches as well as malls, counted Easter as a "spike" in annual sales ranking in the billions. And in the 1970s, some churches began using malls for Easter sunrise services. While religiously minded critics might decry the venue, it simply represents the historical truth of Easter celebrating in America: the union of the marketplace and the resurrection, both sources of renewal, possibilities, and regeneration.

See also: Christmas, Mardi Gras

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aikman, Lonnelle. The Living White House. Washington, D.C.: White House Historical Association, 1987.

Lord, Priscilla Sawyer, and Daniel J. Foley. Easter the World Over. Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1971.

Schmidt, Leigh Eric. "The Commercialization of the Calendar: American Holidays and the Culture of Consumption, 1870–1930." Journal of American History 78, no. 3 (December 1991): 887–916.

——. Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.

Santino, Jack. All Around the Year: Holidays and Celebrations in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Weiser, Francis X. Handbook of Christian Feasts and Customs: The Year of the Lord in Liturgy and Folklore. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958.

James Weeks