Why aren’t there a ton of Easter songs and why is the Easter Bunny’s face nowhere near as iconic as Santa’s?
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Easter doesn’t have a tradition of gift-giving. Christmas does.
Anything that involves people buying stuff will quickly become more commercialized.
Easter is hugely commercialized in the US, getting worse every year. Just go to Walmart around Easter and count how many $50+ premade Easter Baskets there are full of junk.
Santa is so “iconic” because Coca-Cola had a huge marketing campaign featuring Santa as we know him now, starting in the 1930s. In the west, the Easter Bunny is actually an older legend than Santa, but there simply hasn’t been a behemoth corporation marketing him. I couldn’t explain the lack of Easter bunny songs though, although there are actually probably more religious Easter songs than Xmas songs.
Christmas has gifts, but also late year revelry. Time to be merry (and mostly drunk.)
Easter is a solemn Christian holiday and hasn’t veered far from that. The commercialization is relatively new.
One has to do with birth and life and one is about death via torture and coming back from the dead.
One is during the winter (for us up north) so we are looking for cozy family and friend time. And then we exchange gifts.
Also I think one being a fixed date helps solidify it. The moving weekend of Easter makes it seem less important. And the actual day of the Easter egg hunt or even Easter dinner seems flexible for your family to choose.
Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” marks the beginning of Christmas’ commercialization. He was a hugely popular mass market author whose works were pirated and illegally distributed in the US, which went nuts for them.
“A Christmas Carol” places good citizenship/social responsibility at the center of observing the holiday, and surrounds that core with a thick layer of idealized domestic comforts. So for Dickens and his readers, Christmas is about doing good for the needy, being humble, and gathering around a table to feast in a room with a roaring fire and a pile of presents. That’s the model we have today, and that’s what drives the commercialism. When people tell stories about Christmas or stage photos for a product catalog or write a pop Christmas song, they are all riffing on that original model and building on each other.
It’s been centuries now, and nobody has done for Easter, before or since, what Dickens did to kick off Christmas fanaticism. Basically, Christmas is trending and has been for a couple of hundred years.
And when you think about it, that Charles Dickens model of Christmas would naturally get a lot of governmental and cultural support. People who observe Christmas in the way that Dickens wrote about it are people who obey the law, bolster the community, and stimulate the economy. They are pleasant and easy to get along with. They value stability, security, and the common good.
Easter doesn’t have that kind of narrative. Christmas doesn’t have to, either. There are lots of parts of the original story that don’t fit in with what Christmas is about in modern Western society–both Christmas and Easter, as Bible stories, challenge governmental authority, disregard the value of economic security, get down into blood and guts and murder, and depict heroic outsiders in conflict with established order.
But Christmas has acquired enough other cultural associations that you can observe the holiday without diving into those disruptive themes. Nobody has spun Easter in a way that synchronizes so well with standard public life–sure, bunnies and eggs are nonsectarian, but the lore is thin–so there’s not as much cultural support to elevate Easter to the level of Christmas.
Lots of good answers here, but there’s one I haven’t seen yet: Scheduling. Darn near everyone knows that Christmas falls on December 25 every year. I honestly couldn’t tell you whether Easter was on February 15 or April 25 this year, and of course it changes every year. It’s pretty hard to market a holiday when a large share of people don’t even know what day it’s gonna happen.
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