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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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.
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