It’s the big Spring holiday weekend. It’s Good Friday, Passover begins at sundown, and Sunday is Easter. These are serious, revered occasions, but also a time to gather and celebrate:
Easter is also a family celebration — a day to wear Easter dresses and, perhaps, Easter hats, hunt for eggs and welcome spring. It can be expensive. This year, spending a total of $16.8 billion. That’s an average of $145.28 each, up 11 percent from 2011. Bloomberg News
How do we spend that money?
Candy: Easter is the 2nd-biggest candy holiday behind Halloween. We will eat 90 million chocolate Easter bunnies, 700 million Marshmallow Peeps, and about 16 billion jellybeans this year.
Easter Baskets: Prices range from a couple of bucks at the dollar store, to a $70 (or higher) Longaberger.
Decorating Eggs: Eggs became popular at Easter because eating them was forbidden during Lent. Today, we buy 10 million egg-dyeing kits at $4 to $13 each
The Easter Dinner: We will spend $5.5 billion on food this Easter. 33 million of us will dine out. And, of course, we eat HAM. Um, not for Passover, obviously!
Flowers: Easter and Passover combine to account for the 4th-biggest flower holiday. We will spend about $11 for Easter flowers, or over a billion dollars!
Greeting Cards: We will send 57 million Easter cards and spend about $7 each, or over $800 million.
So that’s the tally, and there’s more at the original article. Now, FORGET the cost, and enjoy your family and your holiday! Happy Easter and Happy Pesach from MindField Online!!
Incredible stats for another Christian Holiday! I must admit though that I am among the throngs of “Christians” who literally “spent” the focus of this most ‘Holy of Days’ spending on all of those above mentioned stats!
An interesting question would be to ask how many people who are Christians, and celebrate this holiday that should be centered on Christ, make certain they make it to church services to Celebrate the Ressurection of the Lord… and also , in addition to candy filled Easter Baskets, how many parents take time to explain the “True Meaning” of Easter to their children over that Meticulasly prepared and delicious Easter Ham Dinner?!? It took quite a few years before I “matured” enough to make sure my children knew as much about the “meaning” of these Precious and Holy Holidays, such as Easter, and Christmas as they knew about Santa or The Easter Bunny, but I Thank God that my Guardian Angel tapped me on the shoulder as I filled those baskets or those stockings as soon as my children were old enough to grasp the concept of “Religious Holidays”, to put Christ in the Center of all of our future Celebrations of the greatest gift this world has been given…. and no matter what your Faith, that Universal Gift to mankind has been addressed by many names, in Christianity it is Jesus Christ, which ultimately is “Pure Love”, “True Sacrifice”, and the “Hope” of “Life Everlasting” for us all if we but live our belief in that Love Eternal, Christ the Lord.
thought-provoking stuff, wendy. i agree that, whatever your faith, how reverent you are, once your holiday has become about “the traffic! the crowds at the mall! the prices! they ran out of the perfect toy!”… then, yeah, you are missing the point. thanks for your comments!