Reclaiming Easter - The Spring Equinox
An Easter Celebration for your Reclamation Journey
To start my substack off with a bang I want to share with you how Easter transformed in my reclamation journey from a snoozy holiday about candy and guilt to one about celebrating sex, nature, and the inevitability of our blooming again…
Hi. I’m Becka. I write about my reclamation journey which includes but isn’t limited to deconstructing my childhood faith, reclaiming agency over my body, abandoning hustle culture, exploring nature based spirituality, learning mimetic therapies like RRT and somatics, and my experience as a late diagnosed neurodivergent. Phew.
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I felt within myself the teensiest bit of life again the week before the spring equinox. It wasn’t like a burst of energy. It was more like when in elementary school you did that science experiment with lima beans where you place them in a damp paper towel inside of a ziplock bag and put them on a windowsill for a while and forget about them and then one day you walk by and out of the corner of your eye you catch a tiny glimpse of pale green and you’re like, “Oh shit! You’re actually alive!”. It was more like that. A sprout of life. Even smaller still… a sprout-let.
None of this should surprise me at all, I’ve been on this spiralic healing journey for years now but for some reason it still did.
I guess it’s because I didn’t expect it to take so long this year. I wasn’t as lively this new year as years past to be sure but historically I’d perk back up by February. Not this time though. I’ve never wintered in such a way. And I’m not talking about the weather outside. I’m talking about a long and bleak inner winter.
How It Started -
Years ago now (How many has it been? 5? More? What even is time?) I started playing around with the concept of reclaiming the big religious holidays. It started out as something for my family, for my kids I really mean. My first born was at the age where we were deep into the magical lore of Santa. My husband and I leaned away from the religious narratives of our childhood Christmases by simply leaving them out. We didn’t have a nativity. We didn’t do any religious services or plays or movies. I even made an agnostic Christmas playlist on Spotify because I started to get nervous about having to answer questions about what all those songs were talking about. But that ended up being a non-issue. My kids have since been exposed to all the Christmas songs and have never once asked me about the drummer boy or about why we need to fall on our knees. They genuinely don’t care and treat it all with the same lyrical cognitive dissonance as they do do do Baby Shark. (Sorry I couldn’t resist.)
Then after a while I started to feel like something was missing. Santa’s yang without the balance of the Nativity narrative’s yin felt overly commercial and focused on more more more. While winter (here in the northern hemisphere) is not the season of more. It is the season of rationing, sharing, and making things last during a sparse time of year.
I missed the reverence. The candlelit quiet. The deep knowing in the darkness of a holy night that everything was about to shift.
So I went looking for it.
Long before the nativity story was a story about the sun.
With a “u” not an “o” for all my sunday school grads out there. ;)
The traditions we most commonly associate with the two biggest Christian holidays: Christmas and Easter, came from older festivals that followed the movements of the earth and sun and marked seasonal shifts for the people groups who were so heavily reliant on them for their livelihood.
Christmas, earlier known as Yule (like the lyric “yuletide carols being sung by a choir”), was correlated with the winter solstice, the longest night. This is the moment in the earth’s journey around the sun when, within our 24 hour day, more of those hours were in darkness than in the light of the sun because of the tilt of the earth on its axis. For those in the northern hemisphere, this meant it was colder and darker for longer that day than any other day of the year.
The phrase, “always darkest before the dawn” comes to mind. And that’s basically the vibe of it. The Winter Solstice was/is a festival celebrating making it through that “longest night”. From that point forward every day would have a little bit more daylight and a little bit more warmth until the light and darkness each shone for equal amounts of time welcoming spring. (What we now call “Easter” happens around the time of the spring equinox at the end of March/beginning of April.)
I’ll save waxing poetic about all the parallels of the sun/son returning to the earth to bring the light and save us all until next Christmas but let’s just say the metaphors write themselves.
Reclaiming these narratives about Christmas being focused toward nature and our abiding dependence and connection to it led me to a reclamation of Easter which unfolded in the most beautiful way (not unlike spring itself).
I want to share it with you in case you are coming out of your own very dark winter. Or in case you grew up with Easter as a solemn day centered around your sinfulness and you’d like to reclaim it as a day of celebrating the inevitability of balance and new beginnings. Because here’s where the reclamation of Easter really shines (excuse my sun puns, or don’t, I’m having fun here)...
It is INEVITABLE.
It is cyclic and it is inevitable that it will return again.
After the darkest night comes the return of the sun. Spring comes after Winter. And also, spring NEEDS winter. What dies away nourishes the soil for what is to bloom in the next season. The falling away of winter clears the space for the new growth.
Easter, for me, has become an explosion of joy. Exuberant in its pinks and greens and yellows and blues. A celebration of what CAN BE knowing that it WILL BE but not knowing until it is exactly how it will be. Do you see? It is the bright side of the life death life cycle.
Background -
I am no anthropologist. But here’s a bit of backstory. Not going all the way back to the dawn of time and mostly rooted in the northern European folklore which is part of my ancestry. There are, of course, more roots that trace back even farther to explore and I urge you to look into what you have in your family history.
The modern English name of the holiday “Easter” has roots in goddess worship. Ostara, Eostre, or Eastre was the name of the Germanic goddess of spring and the dawn.
For Wiccans and Pagans, Ostara is also the name of the festival and time of year when the goddess is in her fertile stage (spring equinox)
Aside from Christians and Pagans celebrating themes of resurrection called Easter in the spring, Jewish tradition observes the holiday of Passover during the time of the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere. Persians, ancient Mayans, and ancient Romans also held festivals and traditions during the spring equinox all with themes of rebirth, shedding skin, fertility, growth, and light.
Dieties of spring have many names: Ēostre (Germanic), Persephone (the Greek), Renpet (Egyptian), Blodeuwedd, the Flower-Faced (Celtic), Flora (Roman), Jarylo (Slavic), Morityema (Native American), and the great Spring God of China (春大神) to name a few. These themes tend to run like scarlet threads throughout the tapestries of human history across time and geographical location. Which is also beautiful. And why I feel that a reclamation of these rituals can be such a healing thing. Because it assists us in zooming out from one belief system and looking for a bigger story. What was everyone trying to describe in their different ways? What are we all trying to put language around that is universal and bigger than words?
The Reclamation of Easter -
Freedom from religious dogma (and shame/guilt) truly came for me though when I started to realize that my favorite holiday icons and traditions weren’t Christian. But rather, appropriated into the Christian traditions from the people groups they colonized as they moved across the world.
“There is a delightful story which tells of Eostre finding an injured bird on the ground and, in order to save its life, she transformed it into a hare. The transformation however was incomplete and, although the bird looked like a hare, it still retained the ability to lay eggs. Regardless of this slight mishap, the hare was so grateful for the goddess saving her life that on Eostre’s festival the hare would lay eggs, decorate them and leave them as a token of thanks. In Germany today, many young children still believe that their Easter eggs are laid and delivered by the Easter hare.” ― Carole Carlton Mrs Darley's Pagan Whispers: A Celebration of Pagan Festivals, Sacred Days, Spirituality and Traditions of the Year
Bunnies, chicks, the pastel colors (looking like spring flowers), gifting eggs, fresh green grass… it’s all symbolizing the same things: fertility, rebirth, and resurrection.
But not in the way I learned it. Not through a whitewashed, patriarchal savior and some necromancy. I see it now more like the concept of the nordic rune of the Ignuz (which I have as a tattoo just under my left elbow): the energy that pushes plants up through cracks in the rocks. Dirty. Soil-coated. Deconstructed. Resurrected. A seed cracked open, turned inside out in the dark of the dirt. Webs of fresh roots pulling the building blocks of life reconstituted and rearranged from what fell away in the depths of winter. Turning it into the fuel for what will be. When I zoom out, the echo that reverberates through all these stories from all these centuries is one of joy, hope, and resurrection.
It’s the surprise and DELIGHT of seeing what gets built from the rubble of what was before. (And the knowing that how it is right now is how it will never be again, because… of course… life, death, life….. But we’ll talk about that in another essay.)
Can we celebrate with sheer exuberance what is right now knowing it’s made of all that came before, that which had to fall away, that which had to die to decompose into the good good soil from which this has sprouted? (One of my favorite writers Sophie Strand has a substack called ‘Make Me Good Soil’ which I just adore as a title because good soil doesn’t exist without death and decay. You should absolutely subscribe and read everything she writes because her perspective is delightfully insightful.)
What if the resurrection story of Easter isn’t ascending into the sky?
What if it’s ascending out of the dirt?
…
I like to joke with my close friends (and now with the internet at large, I guess) that if the super fundamental religious folk knew how many of the Easter traditions they do in Sunday School were based in ancient fertility symbols they’d be horrified. Springtime is all about sex, baby.
Remember in Bambi when Thumper is trying to explain spring to little Bambi? All the animals are crazy horny and distracted and Thumper calls it being “twitterpated”? (Ah, Disney.) Blushing cheeks, flitting tails, flirty glances, coming together with a mate (*cough), it’s all about procreation. Easter is all about fertility. Spring is all about new life. Spring is nature being a delicious, gorgeous, distracting, sweet, hornball. And it’s all good. It’s all celebrated. There’s no shame in the birds and the bees.
In cycle syncing, the ovulatory week of a human who menstruates’ is often compared to the season of spring. Everyone who has experienced the hormones of this week, are you understanding the vibe now? That feeling of energy, of exuberance. The sudden surge after feeling so sleepy and sluggish and blah? Wanting to make out with every cute person you see. (For contrast, menstruation week is compared to winter, understandably so. We turn inward, we slow down, we let things fall away)
Spring is pheromones. It’s flirting. It’s showing off your brightest petals and flirtiest blossoms. It’s being beautiful for the sheer inevitability of it. It’s celebrating making it through another turn of the seasonal wheel, another chapter of the book of your life, another spiral of the cycle. It’s flowers in your hair and on your table and on your cakes. It’s fresh herbs and smelling like sunshine and dill. It’s flushed cheeks and swollen lips. It’s resurrection after death. It's light after dark.
Easter is a collective, WE MADE IT. WE CAME BACK. WE ARE HERE. WE ARE NEW. WE ARE ALIVE, GROWING AND BLOOMING.
I want to share with you my reclaimed Ostara/Easter Sunday celebration.
Below is a menu, decoration ideas, activity ideas, and even some supplementary extras for the whole family. All taken from my favorite recipes and activities I’ve incorporated over the years of reclaiming this holiday. Please enjoy. Send me pictures. Tag me. Tell me which become your favorite. Let me know what you add…
Low energy ideas:
Plant some seeds (sunflowers are especially gratifying because they tend to sprout and grow so quickly, but herbs are wonderful too!)
Take a rainbow walk. (Look for 1 thing in each color of the rainbow)
Make and share fresh foods with loved ones
Decorate with spring colors or plants
Plant some milkweed for the monarchs
Decorate eggs and eat egg related dishes
Bring the outdoors in (decroate with flowers, twigs, leaves, etc)
Do an herbal bath soak with springtime herbs like rosemary and lavender
Higher energy ideas:
Plant a garden
Spring clean your space
Dye and decorate eggs
Make seasonal recipes and see what your favorite springtime flavors are
Journal and reflect
Going on a rainbow flower scavenger hunt
Do an egg hunt with candy or treat filled fake eggs
Here’s a link to the recipe I used: Must Love Herbs
Becka’s Ostara/Easter Day Menu:
Herbed Deviled Eggs decorated with fresh herbs and edible flowers
Springtime dirt cups (fun for kids to help decorate too) Here’s a 2nd fun recipe.
Herbed butter candle sourdough (yes like the viral tiktok trend!)
Strawberry pavlova
Black and white cookies (because they’re perfect for the equinox)
Journal Prompts:
What has been laying dormant that I hope to have grow in this next season?
What thoughts, behaviors, situations, or people am I leaving behind in the winter months so that I may have a fresh start and plant the seeds for what I desire. What are those seeds of my new desires?
What do I need to release that has stunted my growth? What do I need to ask for support with? What care do I need to take to help my intentions grow?
What do I need to release that has stunted my growth? What do I need to ask for support with? What care do I need to take to help my intentions grow?
Seed Starting Ritual:
Take this time to think about your intentions for the upcoming season. What are your goals, your aspirations, and your dreams? As you plant each seed, imagine how they will spout and grow, providing new life, just as your intentions will do. Speak an intention into each seed as you tuck it below the dirt. Let the seeds be a reminder that some intentions have to be tended in order for them to flourish, just as yours do. When the seeds begin to transform into a beautiful plant, remember to take a moment to reflect on the intention assigned to each seed and feel gratitude for the visible representation of that intention growing and coming to life.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this first essay in my new Substack offered for free so you can get a taste of what’s to come! Subscribe so you don’t miss more essays, seasonal shift tips, musings on a healing journey, and more. Thank you so much for supporting my writing and being witnesses on this healing journey. I’m so happy to have a new medium for longer form writing, seasonal support, and vulnerable conversations on all things reclamation and healing journey. Welcome to my sacred space.