The expression “happy as Easter” is used to indicate a state of great happiness or contentment.
Easter is a Christian holiday that celebrates the resurrection of Jesus, which symbolizes rebirth. Easter celebrations are experienced as a liberation from bonds and restrictions. Easter is linked to spring, which represents the awakening of nature. Popular wisdom has linked the concepts of Easter and happiness.
According to Christian tradition, it is the celebration of Christ’s resurrection: the happiness and joy experienced by (more or less) everyone, therefore, should be attributed to this happy event. At least logically. The answer is different. It seems that in the pre-Easter period, in times of greater orthodoxy, a phase was experienced so full of very heavy sacrifices, that all the joy possible was placed in the festivity by the human being who had lived the ordeal of the period of penance. In fact, in many ancient texts (we are talking about the late 1800s) it is said how the various weeks preceding the great Catholic celebration were sanctioned by many prohibitions. It was not possible to communicate after twelve o’clock, there was an absolute ban on eating meat, fish, sweets and drinking alcohol, a ban on intimate relations with the spouse, a ban on singing, playing, reading poetry, painting, listening to music and much more: in short, it was forbidden to do anything beautiful in life. An ancient saying that means liberation Our saying “Happy as Easter” is therefore due to this very restrictive penance. Because the celebration came as a true liberation from all those very tight bonds, and people could finally go back to smiling, singing, reading, making love, dedicating themselves to art and their vices, enjoying dishes that they had had to give up for a long time, and so on. They finally returned to normal life, leaving behind the gloom that they had imposed on themselves out of pure religiosity.
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