"Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox."And what is an ecclesiastical full moon, I hear you ask?
The web page I got this definition from, (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/easter.php), does not explain except to say that an ecclesiastical full moon is not quite the same thing as an astronomical full moon, but that they are pretty close. I am sufficiently annoyed by the presumption of Christian ecclesiastics in setting up their own full moon, different from everybody else's, that I have not pursued the matter further.
Anyway, this year the moon was full only a few days before the Equinox, and will not be full again until the wee hours of the morning tomorrow, which is a Monday, putting off Easter until April 24th.
Easter is actually a perfectly good word for either holiday--ask your Christian ecclesiastics where the word comes from. Don't ask our fuzzier-brained Pagans, actually, many of whom are pretty sure it has to do with Ishtar. That similarity in sound is apparently pure accident, English and ancient Semitic languages not being very closely related. "Easter" does derive from a Germanic Goddess of the dawn.
The Christian scheduling strategy was to give their God the last word in the days when people were still talking to more than one. However, I think it was a miscalculation on their part to allow for quite so much lag time. This way the Pagans get the last word with May Eve, one of our real blockbusters, less than a week after.
And it is an inconvenience for us when the Spring Equinox and Easter are so widely separated in time, because Safeway doesn't have Easter candy for Pagan children.
My schoolteacher problem is that the spring break is always the week before Easter, even though probably no more than ten percent of my students celebrate it (most of them being Buddhists and Muslims). I am accustomed to a spring semester rhythm in which we do midterm exams just before spring break, take a week off to reflect on the implications, then come back and really get down to business. This year it looks as though we will be getting down to business far too late.
Kathy Mar has a wonderful song called "Everybody's Moon." For just $.99, download and listen to the whole thing.
