Easter is the most important festival in the Christian year and, in Britain, the second biggest holiday after Christmas. Unlike in America, it comes with a proper long weekend: Good Friday and Easter Monday are both public holidays in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Why the date moves
Easter is a moveable feast, calculated from the moon rather than the calendar. The rule settled at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 places it on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. In practice it lands somewhere between 22 March and 25 April, and the whole school year is arranged around wherever it falls.
Parliament passed an act in 1928 to fix Easter permanently to the weekend after the second Saturday in April. It has never been brought into force, and remains on the statute book as a piece of legislation nobody got round to.
The week before
Holy Week runs from Palm Sunday. Maundy Thursday is marked by the monarch distributing Maundy money — specially minted silver coins given to elderly recipients chosen for community service, one for each year of the sovereign’s age. Good Friday is solemn, with three-hour services and, traditionally, no meat.
The food
- Hot cross buns — spiced, fruited, marked with a cross, eaten toasted with butter. Traditionally on Good Friday; now in the shops from January.
- Chocolate eggs — hollow, foil-wrapped, and a considerable industry. Cadbury Creme Eggs appear in January and are consumed in enormous numbers.
- Roast lamb — the traditional Easter Sunday roast, with mint sauce.
- Simnel cake — a light fruit cake with marzipan and eleven marzipan balls, one for each apostle minus Judas.
Eggs and what is done with them
Egg rolling — racing hard-boiled eggs down a hill — is genuinely still practised in the North of England and Scotland, notably at Avenham Park in Preston. Egg hunts are near-universal for children, and the National Trust runs them at properties across the country.
The Easter Bunny is a relatively recent German import, and older British tradition simply had the eggs appear.
Scotland
Good Friday is not a statutory holiday in Scotland, a legacy of the Reformation and the Church of Scotland’s historic suspicion of festival days. Many Scottish employers grant it anyway, but banks and some shops stay open.
What is actually open
Less than on a normal bank holiday. Large shops in England and Wales must stay closed all day on Easter Sunday under the Sunday Trading laws — it is one of only two days a year with that restriction, the other being Christmas Day. Small shops can open. Garden centres do a roaring trade, and it is the traditional weekend for the first barbecue of the year, usually in unsuitable weather.