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A Compare And Contrast Essay On American Culture

722 Words3 Pages

London Carter
Professor Deshaies
ENG 111
13 April 2023
Compare and Contrast Essay
Many people come together with loved ones every year to celebrate Easter. Cooking, feasting, hiding Easter eggs, and playing games are all a part of the spring festivities that many families find themselves celebrating the holiday. But many people don’t understand the deep history of Easter and how the festivities change from culture to culture. When comparing America’s Easter background to England’s, you can find many similarities: the Easter Bunny, chocolate eggs, and home-cooked dinners. But if you look beyond the surface level, you will find many ways our past Easter traditions differ from England’s. Easter can be defined as a “moveable feast” because, unlike …show more content…

Easter seemingly has more theologically sound beginnings in America, where religious influence was extremely prevalent. The Resurrection story is commonly told in almost every denomination of Christianity and serves as the core of the Christian Gospel (Staff). The three-day period of Jesus’ crucifixion, death, burial, and revival is marked by Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday (Editors). In the Catholic Church, Easter Sunday marks the end of Lent, the end of Holy Week, and the start of the liturgical year (Catholic Online). In England, Easter did not originate from a Christian background. However, during the fifth and sixth centuries, the Saxons- a group of Germans who conquered southern England (Britannica)- shifted from Pagan worship to Christianity after missionaries entered the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms …show more content…

They specifically placed Easter following the Spring Equinox because it marked the end of winter and welcomed new life given to the Earth during the season (Thompson). The Saxons pointed to eggs and flowers as symbols of female fertility and prayed to Eostre for the fertility of the Earth (Thompson). Eostre’s companion was always a hare; recent archaeological research has confirmed that the hare was consistently her symbol throughout history (Thompson). On the contrary, this spring goddess was not worshipped as prolifically in America. Even if people didn’t celebrate Easter for reasons of their faith, Easter was still a time to come together with family and kick off the new spring season

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