Remember The Family Circus, the wholesome comic strip that exemplified traditional, Christian, and family values? I believe it's actually still in print. Now, do you remember that during the late 1970s and 1980s, they did a few holiday specials — Valentine's Day, Christmas, and Easter?
The entire plot for the Easter special is this:
This Easter, Billy has plans to help PJ find his first Easter egg. Dolly helps but Jeffy wants to catch the Easter Bunny. When he does, the entire family is surprised, even Sam. In the end, PJ is happy and the day is another wonderful Family Circus Easter.
That's it. No flash, no drama.
Compared to today's holiday specials and cartoons, it sounds pretty mundane, but I remember watching that over and over again with my mom when I was a little girl. She'd recorded it on VHS at some point, and every Easter, we'd watch it. It's a memory that gives me warm fuzzies, and I found myself thinking about it a lot this past weekend.
Part of it was because I was missing my mom in general, but part of it was because I was watching via social media my friends preparing their own kids for Easter, and I couldn't help but think about how much simpler things used to be.
As Christians, Easter was an important time of year for us, but I'm not writing this to preach religion — just thinking about my childhood experiences compared to those today. I remember every year, my mom and grandmother would take me to the mall to find an Easter dress. We'd load up in the car and drive into Atlanta to the now-demolished Shannon Mall or maybe Greenbriar or Cumberland and spend a few hours looking at pastel pink and blue dresses.
My reward for my patience was a stop by the food court to have Chick-fil-A — back then, those delicious nuggets were a special occasion reserved only for trips to the mall. Free-standing restaurants were few and far between. We didn't get one in my town until I was in middle or high school.
In the days leading up to Easter, my mom would buy a couple of dozen eggs, and she and I would stand over the stove and dye them in various colors. I might add a few stickers now and then, but we generally let our creativity shine with the colors we made out of cheap, basic food coloring.
We'd wear our dresses to church, but we also wore them to our family Easter gathering afterward. My grandparents would put on a big Easter egg hunt for my cousin and Emily and me (and later, all the boy cousins who came along after us), and I remember some of those cheap plastic eggs being stuffed with candy or even a dollar. Then we'd eat our ham and all the food my mom, grandmother, and aunts cooked. My mom and I would always go home and watch our favorite: It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown.
Oh, I almost forgot my easter basket. My mom, I mean, the Easter Bunny, did that every year, but it was simple. It had candy and usually books because my parents were always encouraging me to read. Maybe a little toy now and then, but it wasn't meant to be Christmas morning or my birthday. At least, not back then.
While I realize a lot of this about the secular side of Easter, and I'm sure many of you are itching to yell at me about that, our faith was peppered in, whether it was at Sunday School or my mom reading me books about the reason why we celebrated. Despite everything else, the Good News was ingrained in us.
But these days, it seems like Easter has gone from something special into absolutely nothing, or some overdone production that mimics every other occasion.
Maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong people, but they aren't just buying a cute little outfit to wear to church and having family lunches and egg hunts with cousins after, no. They're buying the whole family matching outfits, hiring professional photographers, and scheduling brunch at fancy restaurants months in advance. Is this a wedding or a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus?
Easter eggs are created with kits now. Out with that old toxic food coloring and in with turning a hard-boiled egg into your favorite Disney character. And don't get me started on Easter baskets. They aren't just filled with candy and books; they're filled with hundreds of dollars' worth of toys and gadgets. I've seen kids get iPads. Someone I know got their kid a bike for Easter last year. A bike! That doesn't even fit into a basket.
And there's no way you're going to find the Easter specials of my childhood on TV. They're too wholesome. Too religious. Too boring. Kids these days rarely have the attention spans for that. I don't even know that you can find Easter cartoons on mainstream TV anymore, and even if they do, are people even home to watch them?
I did some research on this — and talked to some of my colleagues who also grew up in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s — and there are a lot of potential reasons why things have changed. Some say it has to do with the fact that the number of people who affiliate themselves with any type of religion has dwindled in recent decades, but I don't think that's the case here. I live in a very Christian, church-going part of the country, and that would be the exception, not the rule, in my geographic circle.
The truth is that I think it's a combination of things. Everything's so commercial and in-your-face these days, why not make Easter that way too?
I also came across an interesting article in the student newspaper, The Guilfordian, that suggests cultural reasons for the change, and I think that's part of it, as well.
Media portrayal also plays a role in Easter’s diminishing significance. While Christmas is inescapable in movies, music and television specials, Easter-themed content is much scarcer.
Once-popular Easter TV specials and religious films have seen a decline in mainstream networks. Even in public schools, many districts have scaled back Easter celebrations in favor of more neutral 'spring festivals,' reflecting a broader move toward religious neutrality in an increasingly diverse society.
It starts going on about how we should have inclusive spring festivals instead of Easter Celebrations — no thanks — but I do think it makes a great point. As a society, we've had this woke stuff forced upon us for so long now that we've turned what used to be a special holiday for the Christian faith into something that looks just like every other occasion, so that everyone can feel included without doing the heavy lifting the rest of the year.
Combine that with the fact that many people of my generation think that everything they do needs to be social media worthy so they can upload it to Instagram and show off their "perfect" lives, and it creates a perfect storm that leaves little room for the simple Easter of our youth — the one where we watched Charlie Brown and Snoopy and The Family Circus, and ran around our grandparents' yard in our Easter dresses, looking for that plastic egg with the dollar.
P.S. That Family Circus Easter special is on YouTube.
