ALT Text: Scene is WAITROSE. Behind it is a staff member, whose name we will soon learn is BECKY. She is dealing with a customer, for now out of shot, while talking to her manager on the phone.

BECKY [on phone]: Yeah, hiya...

2 BECKY: Yes I have a customer here who wants to complain about the Easter eggs.

3 BECKY [putting hand over receiver while addressing the customer stood at the desk in front of her]: Sorry what was your name again?

4 [Pull back to show the customer is a very tall, green-skinned, PAGAN GODDESS, festooned with flowers. Stood next to her is her son, a normal human teenager in a hoodie, who looks mortified by his mum.]

PAGAN GODDESS: Eostre the Pagan Goddess of Fertility

5 BECKY Sorry - Your name is Easter…?

PAGAN GODDESS: Eostre.

6

[Vicky pauses, trying to take this in].

VICKY: Your name is Easter and you want to complain about the Easter eggs.

7 PAGAN GODDESS: Sorry love, what’s your name?

BECKY: Becky

PAGAN GODDESS: Well, Vicky -

8 PAGAN GODDESS: If it was you who’d shagged the solar god of the Equinox to give birth to an actual living god - my son Darren here -

TEENAGE BOY: Muuum…

9 PAGAN GODDESS: ….only to have all your efforts totally forgotten by history, you’d have a complaint too!

10 PAGAN GODDESS: Aisle four is full of products, with no hint of the true meaning of the festival!

11 BECKY: You mean… Jesus…?

PAGAN GODDESS: I mean shagging, Vicky.

12 PAGAN GODDESS: Is it too much to see just a little bit of pre-Christian sex in Aisle 4?

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[–] 4 points 7 months ago (21 children)

Without checking, I think it's only called Easter in the UK, everywhere else in Europe uses a derivation of passover

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  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Pretty sure the German "Ostern" has the same root. As I understand it, Passover is a completely different (Jewish?) holiday?

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    My family celebrated both Passover and Easter for a few years. We were not Jewish, although we do have some distant Ashkenazi ancestry.

    There was a trend for a while for people to "prove" their devoutness as Christians or Catholics by celebrating Jewish traditions because they gave rise to Christianity. It was weird

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Well, their religion is centered around a Jew. If you want to do as Jesus would have done then you celebrate the Jewish traditions.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    I mean, it was very performative and it felt more like a novelty with how shallow it was. That's what was weird, there wasn't respect towards the traditions or an attempt to gain an understanding of the history of the faith or closeness with god.

    I suppose looking back all of the traditions we practiced felt performative lol

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    In Slovenian it is called Big Night

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (6 children)

    In my language it means "meat taking" or "taking of the meat".

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Not derived from passover, but pesach.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Passover is a Jewish holiday.

    UK is not a Jewish country so the two holidays are unrelated, but obviously a lot of different cultures are going to celebrate the days getting longer again so it's not surprising that there are multiple different holidays that are all celebrated at the same time. Also of course the Christian church overwrote a lot of pagan holidays so Easter being celebrated when the days get longer tracks even though that's not actually what the celebration is about.

    I'm not really sure what the egg laying rabbit is about though.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    Well they are related, Jesus was Jewish and the last supper was celebrated during the passover holiday. Presumably the first Christians were Jewish and the passover name kinda stuck and found its way into the other cultures.

    I first found out about it when celebrating Easter with my Italian room mates who called it Pascha. I wanted to know why and lo and behold Wikipedia came to the rescue. Which, according to Wikipedia, Easter is only called Easter in the UK. Happy to be corrected by language other than English speakers though!

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Easter?wprov=sfla1

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