Easter is Christianity's most important holiday, a celebration of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the first-century Judean man who was crucified by Roman soldiers outside Jerusalem. The holiday—observed by Christians in more than 95 countries, by roughly 2.4 billion people—culminates Holy Week, the stretch from Palm Sunday through Maundy (or Holy) Thursday and Good Friday. It concludes the 40-day period of fasting and penance that starts on Ash Wednesday, known as Lent (46 days if you count Sundays).
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Easter is observed as a national holiday in more than 95 countries, with traditions varying wildly—from water fights in Hungary to crime novel reading in Norway—reflecting how thoroughly Christian practice has mixed with local culture.
Walk through the entire narrative of Holy Week, painting by painting, from the "Agony in the Garden" to the "Supper at Emmaus" from masters like Titian and Caravaggio.
Good Friday commemorates the crucifixion of Jesus, the darkest moment in the Christian story (which makes the name a genuine puzzle). Typical explanations say "good" once meant "holy" or "sacred," while other traditions dub it "sorrowful Friday." Christians observe rather than celebrate the day, with services, fasting, and quiet. It's always two days before Easter, sitting between Maundy (or Holy) Thursday and Easter.
NT Wright, a leading New Testament scholar, argues that first-century Jews held a wide spectrum of beliefs about the afterlife. This included that the early Christian claim of one individual rising bodily from the dead, ahead of the general resurrection, was without precedent in Judaism or the wider Greco-Roman world.
The secular Easter—bunnies, eggs, baskets, candy—is almost entirely a German import. The egg-laying hare called Osterhase arrived with Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants in the 1700s; children left out nests for it to fill, which eventually became baskets. The word "Easter" itself may trace to Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring, though scholars contest the holiday's pagan origins.
Unlike Christmas, Easter has no fixed date: It falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21, a formula set by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE to form a standard across Christianity. The result is a window of 35 possible dates, from March 22 to April 25.
All four Gospels agree that the tomb was empty and that Jesus appeared to followers—but they diverge on many secondary details: how many women came, at what hour, how many angels were present, and in what order Jesus appeared to whom. Historians often see those divergences as a sign of independent accounts rather than coordinated fabrication.
That's up from $189 in 2025 and the previous record of $192 in 2023. The vast majority of consumers intend to use it on candy (92%), followed by food (89%) and other gifts.
Three of the four Gospels describe the Last Supper as a Passover meal, and scholars have cataloged more than a dozen parallels: wine, broken bread, sung hymns, and reclining at the table. But most historians of early Judaism now note that the formal Passover Seder didn't exist as a codified ritual until after 70 CE, decades after Jesus died.
It's often said Easter is derived from pagan rituals. The word "Easter" does stem from a Germanic term for "dawn," but most cultural names for the holiday more clearly point to its Jewish history in the Passover.
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