Why People Prefer Christmas To Easter

Regardless of whether you have that preference yourself or approve of it, it seems that most people have it. I think Susan Roll is right about some of the reasons for that preference:

One way to express the discrepancy between the two pillars of the Christian year, Christmas and Easter, is in terms of the predictability of their position in the civil calendar: Christmas from its fast position secures a constellation of associations with a safely defined place in the calendar which forms part of its identity, while Easter, because its date 'wanders' seemingly unpredictably, floats within a five-week period together with its potential net of associated meanings and elements, disconnected from a secure point of reference. Conveniently located on a Sunday to permit a holiday weekend (a weekend which officially includes Monday in much of Europe) Easter in the northern hemisphere tends to be reduced easily to the level of the first major spring holiday, without much of the intense emotional investment of Christmas. All of this points back to the influence of festal time and time-rhythms on not only peoples' disposition toward celebrating a feast, but on the core characteristics of the feast itself.

The real dichotomy exists between Easter and Christmas on the level of experience, of personal and collective associations as expressed in festal practice, as well as on the relative importance of each. Here lies the most profound break between theory and practice, or, at the risk of polemicizing the question by setting it in the fundamental terms of analysis of this study, between festal practice as spontaneously and generally perceived to be appropriate, and festal practice as legislated, promoted or programmed into liturgy and catechesis in a top-down prescriptive manner.

To the mentality of the West, and not only in the contemporary period of history, Christmas simply seems "more real" than Easter, more accessible, more organically inserted into the common lived experience in which the often-barely-detectible presence of God becomes manifest, to echo the language of Epiphany. The vast majority have had some experience of birth - giving birth or assisting at a birth, rejoicing at a birth in the family - but no one has seen a resurrection. Parents often attest that the birth of their child felt like a once-in-a-lifetime peak experience, almost a holy moment, and that they would do almost anything to protect and take care of this vulnerable, precious little being just born into the world.

By extension the family values are traditionally heavily invested in Christmas, a period when in the Northern hemisphere a home-unit or community more naturally draws together, cozy and comfortable inside on a night which turns dark too early, and often cold, snowy or generally forbidding outdoors, around a fireplace (or its modern counterpart, the warm comforting glow-in-a-box, the television) which magnetically draws attention and acts as an orientation point in the home. The inward-turning nesting impulse, as it were, enjoys no counterpart at Easter….

A phenomenon which needs no documentation is the fact that when persons baptized and raised as Christians leave the church, whether through a sudden break in anger or outrage, or a gradual process of drifting away due to indifference or disengagement, Christmas seems to be "the last thing to go." Even those who retain deep disagreements, even bitterness, toward the church of their youth tend to return, if at all, on Christmas Eve, far more than at Easter, and as a matter of a felt appropriateness linked to the nature of the feast in its own context of the time of the year; returning to church for a wedding or a funeral, on the other hand, would entail different issues. They crowd into the masses at Christmas, particularly Christmas Eve, less as participants than as spectators, to retrieve something of their childhood sense of belonging. Hearing the familiar Christmas story serves the comforting repetitive function known all too well to parents of toddlers who demand that the parent read the same story exactly the same way, over and over. All the sensory aspects of the liturgy engage the imagination and call up associations which operate beyond the level of cognitive, logocentric functioning and touch them on a level deeper than the pain, or anger, or emptiness which propelled them away from the church - smells of pine and incense, evocative and heartrendingly familiar Christmas music, poetic lyrics, mysteriously flickering candles in a hushed crowd obscured in darkness, and above all of these, a sense of a mysterious presence and a depth of beauty and meaning which evades words.

One factor which might account for the intensely magnetic draw which Christmas exercises on marginal, often alienated Christians, could be the integration of compelling birth/life symbolism with the greatest beauty in music, decor and text that the parish can muster, as an aesthetic experience. Another aspect is simply the pervasiveness of the socio-cultural season of Christmas and the effect this has both of de-ecclesiasticizing the feast so that it would not present a threatening face (a point crucial especially to exiled Christians dealing with traumas related to such things as clergy abuse), but also to mainstream the acceptability of letting down one's guard, giving in to sentimentality and celebrating vulnerability. A further aspect connected with the relative Easter/Christmas balance could be the observation that contemporary Western Christians in general tend to be 'incarnational' in their faith, and that this foundation perdures even after specific forms and habits of worship have disappeared. Perhaps because of its accessibility and the less-threatening, less morbid but equally dramatic way, the Christmas story affirms the often damaged sense of human dignity of alienated Christians, as opposed to the story of the Paschal suffering and death of Christ, even when followed by the resurrection, because of the heavy overtones of personal guilt and expiation.

(Toward The Origins Of Christmas [The Netherlands: Kok Pharos Publishing House, 1996], 235-36, 239)