Why turning easter into Christmas is CRACKERS!

It’s a dismal sight: shops flogging Xmas-style novelties for the holiest week of the year — and it’s prompted a despairing QUENTIN LETTS to declare...

WIth their genius for devaluing the English language, the marketing people at sainsbury’s are promoting their ‘Easter essentials’.

these are 51 products without which (if we are to accept that word ‘essential’) you and I will be incapable of celebrating Easter.

the items range from sainsbury’s hummus to mr Kipling lemon fancies, Bassets Jelly Baby Bunnies to daffodil- decorated paper napkins.

hear that, Britain? Without your sainsbury’s Italian Antipasto selection (£2.38 per 100g), your Crosta & mollica rosemary Linguette and a Cake Angels Disney Frozen Enchanted Cupcake Activity kit, plus so much more, your Easter will be a dud. Washout. Pah!

Go forth and multiply our turnover figures, saith the Lord mammon. And lo, the people meekly did as they were commanded.

Commercialism has been nibbling into Easter for years — arguably centuries, if you count medieval pilgrimages — but something snapped inside me when I read that we are now being told that Easter is ‘ the second Christmas’.

No less an authority than the editor of Good housekeeping magazine, Carolyn Bailey, was wheeled out to declare that Easter crackers are becoming de rigueur in all aspiring homesteads.

‘We feel people now want that extra touch to finish off the table,’ she said. ‘this year we’ve seen more people buying gifts and decorations for Easter, including crackers which are normally bought for Christmas. Easter is becoming like a second Christmas.’

so quoth one our pre-eminent prophets of bling. sure enough, Waitrose claims to have seen a 63 per cent rise in the number of Easter crackers it is selling. Good grief. But do we really believe that 63 per cent increase figure? sixty three per cent of what?

And are customers really already rushing to buy these items? Or is this just a Pr effort by the supermarkets to bully us into thinking that Easter crackers and Easter presents and all sort of other Easter purchases are a social imperative?

We should resist this shameless sales hype. We should do so for reasons of taste and selfrespect, but also something deeper. the day Easter becomes another Christmas will be the day Anglicanism’s sea walls are breached and our civilisation is washed away.

I say so not out of some miserly concern for the pennies and pounds. Nor do I oppose the promotion of Easter out of a Cromwellian distaste for an uplifting spring festival which in pre-Christian Britain was called ‘Eostre’ and celebrated the teutonic goddess of dawn. the pagan precedence of our Christian Easter is still evident in the way some people climb hills on Easter morning to see the rising sun do its Easter ‘dance’.

Oliver Cromwell and his 17thcentury Puritans tried to stop Easter being celebrated — just as they ‘ cancelled’ Christmas — on the grounds that every day in their lives was holy and there was thus no need for designated ‘holy-days’, the original meaning of ‘holidays’.

And yet, like a desiccated spoilsport, I inveigh against Easter crackers? I need to explain myself.

CHRISTMAS marks the arrival of the infant Christ. When you first visit a new-born child, you will usually take a present — a babygro or cuddly toy or whatever.

the three Wise men of the magi may have gone several better than a mothercare rattle when they presented the infant Jesus with gold, frankincense and myrrh, but the principle was the same.

Easter’s story is more complex. Yes, it marks a rebirth (which is why we give Easter eggs, representative of new life) but it is pre-shadowed by the most sombre of times.

In holy Week, which immediately precedes Easter, we contemplate the story of Christ’s arrest, trial and Crucifixion. Good Friday, just two days before Easter Day, is the bleakest of days. We remember the suffering of Christ on that awful cross. this is not some form of ‘fake news’, by the way.

Even secularists concede that Jesus Christ lived and was crucified on the orders of the roman governor Pontius Pilate.

Christ’s mother, mary, will, indeed, have watched her son writhe with pain.

And if we take the eyewitness textual evidence of the New testament at its word, we can think of the heavens darkening as Christ succumbed to death and a storm breaking over Jerusalem that terrible day, symbolic of God’s fury.

On Good Friday, church altars are stripped bare and services are conducted with long silences allowing us to confront the idea of death. A Good Friday church is as cold and stark as a tomb. I find that terribly moving.

In such a week, do we want jingles on telly urging us to hurry out to buy our ‘Easter essentials’ such as special crackers?

In crackers, you will normally find a paper hat — a crown, if you like. On Easter Day, there is only one person who wears a crown. And the joy of Easter is something

more cerebral than can be encapsulated in any flimsy cracker. the late poet John Betjeman wrote this about Easter: ‘The last year’s leaves are on the beech; The twigs are black; the cold is dry; To deeps beyond the deepest reach The Easter bells enlarge the sky.’

that phrase ‘to deeps beyond the deepest’, for me, describes the Easter experience.

I suspect that may be true even for those who claim not to be spiritual. Churchgoers, admittedly, are in a minority in heathen 21st-century Britain.

millions of youngsters have been left uneducated about Easter. their teachers are either too indolent to bother or they are in hock to Left-wing multiculturalist dogma which regards Christian teaching as some sort of insult to ‘minorities’.

As a result of that mad, culturally suicidal philosophy, Christianity has been repressed and eclipsed while Islam (foreign, ergo good, so far as the self-hating multicultural lobby is concerned) has been encouraged. the BBC’s last two heads of religious broadcasting have been muslim. says it all about the Beeb, really.

millions of British children do not know the point of Easter. some allegedly think it marks the Easter Bunny’s birthday. One survey of children aged six to ten found that 25 per cent thought Easter was an anniversary of the invention of chocolate.

Less than half knew it was a celebration of Christ’s resurrection.

THIS is not just a disgrace in terms of failing religious observance. It is sheer, shameful ignorance of history and culture.

In school, my children have been taught as much about Buddhism and Islam and hinduism as they have about Christianity.

Given such gaps in public knowledge, would it then not make sense to encourage the commercialisation of Easter? A box of Easter crackers might at least encourage discussion of the Easter message.

No, I still disagree. We should let our Easter customs spring from family and local tradition, not from the shops or plastic packaging.

For me, in childhood, Easter was the day our mother filled the house with flowers — daffodils and Easter primroses. the sight of so much colour after Lent’s penitential season was dazzling. something similar goes on near us at hereford Cathedral where they mark the arrival of Easter with numerous vases of lilies.

the scent is remarkable and quite unmatched by anything a supermarket cracker or a bag of ‘Easter essentials’ could offer.

For a friend of mine, childhood Easters were always about creating home-made, moss-strewn models of Christ’s tomb, using a large pebble to represent the stone that was rolled across the face of the cave where the body was placed.

Or how about the great English tradition of mystery plays, which has seen a heartening revival in recent years?

A few years ago, our village church mounted just such a production. What it lacked in West End polish it more than compensated for with its communal spirit and a pride in both our dramatic and our Biblical heritage.

In such intangibles lies the spirit of Easter. It gains its potency not from tinsel or presents or Jelly bunnies or any number of Easter crackers.

I return to that line from John Betjeman, ‘deeps beyond the deepest’, the penumbral gubbins within us, possibly part-rooted in pagan relief at the arrival of spring yet also given substance in the Christian story of hope after obliteration.

sorry, but that is all you need for an Easter ‘essential’. Keep your crackers for Christmas.