As supermarkets blur the lines between Christian festivals, George Lapshynov calls for us to remember how to truly celebrate Easter. 31/03/2026

A few days into the New Year and still in the throes of the post–holiday haze, I walked into my local Sainsbury’s for a small shop. And there it was: the Easter chocolate aisle, proclaiming proudly that Easter had arrived on January 5th. It stood there, provocatively, unrequited, mere yards into a supermarket whose air was still filled with the smell of Brussels sprouts and pigs–in–blankets.

There is something absurd about living by a calendar whose holidays seem to arrive whenever the supermarkets say they do. Halloween begins some time in September. Christmas appears the day after Halloween. Easter arrives with prematurely laid chocolate eggs in January, while the last discounted mince pies wait to be cleared from the shelves. Holidays no longer punctuate the year, but smother it, blending into a single, shapeless blob of novelty chocolate.

The result is not that we celebrate more. It is that we celebrate less well.

Festivals are intended to mark the passage of time, distinguishing one day from another and one season from the next. They give shape and texture to the year. The calendar was invented for the very purpose of keeping track of religious festivals. Holidays are therefore moments with a narrative, a rationale, an atmosphere, and historically, a pattern of preparation, restraint, anticipation, and celebration.

The modern liturgical calendar, meanwhile, is made up of promotional aisles, where the days of saints are replaced by confectionery in slightly different shapes to keep track of time. And holidays, have become little more than an occasion to eat chocolate in the general direction of a religious tradition.

This is not a plea for less celebration. Britain is not suffering from an excess of cheerfulness, to say the least. In many respects, ours is a lonely and frayed culture: hyper–connected, overstimulated and often spiritually threadbare. It is very important that we have shared rituals and occasions for celebration and spending time with family. There is nothing wrong with enjoying an Easter egg or a mince pie, giving one away or delighting in the small extravagances of a festival. Christians, of all people, should not be embarrassed to rejoice.

However, rejoicing only makes sense if there is something to rejoice in and a way of distinguishing a feast from ordinary times. Without some downtime, a feast quickly becomes indistinguishable from any other day. If we shop as though it is always Christmas, eat chocolate as though it is always Easter and indulge as though every week were a special occasion, then no occasion will feel special. Celebration that is not connected to anything meaningful becomes, by definition, meaningless, and leads to boredom. Or in my case, exhaustion.

This is why the commercialisation of our religious festivals is more damaging than it first seems. It does not merely democratise ancient holy days. It hollows them out. It renders them unintelligible. It detaches them from the stories and practices that gave rise to them in the first place, offering them back to us as harmless cultural products. They retain the shell but lose the substance.

Consider Easter. Christians celebrate the resurrection of Christ, the defeat of death, the harrowing of hell, and the emergence of a new creation. It is not just a minor ‘spring festival’ with a few spiritual overtones. It is the theological and historical centre of the Christian year. Yet in public life, it is presented, at best, as a vague seasonal interval marked by pastel colours, extended weekends, and spring–themed edible garden decorations. At worst, it is misrepresented as a pagan festival that belligerent Christianity shamelessly appropriated from the harmless tree–hugging, bunny–worshiping pagans of Europe.

Sometimes this commercialisation is simply lazy. At other times, it is ludicrous, bordering on deranged. A colleague recently showed us a photograph of a pair of oversized glossy, red chocolate lips, marketed as “the most stylish Easter present”. The lips stared into my soul with a kind of mute confidence, as if they knew we had all long since given up asking what precisely any of this had to do with Easter. I hesitate to be po–faced about these things – no one likes a killjoy. However, I also struggle to believe that if they were animated, those lips would proclaim the Paschal greeting, “Christ is risen!”

My objection is neither to chocolate nor to silliness. (God knows I love both too much.) I object to meaninglessness and to us mining Christian festivals for atmosphere after setting aside their truth claims. We are, as a culture, following in the footsteps of those towns that collapse because decades of intensive mining have hollowed out the ground beneath them.

The selective nature of the process makes this more rather than less conspicuous. In a Britain that prides itself on being multicultural and religiously diverse, Christian holy days are often treated as common cultural property, open to parody, dilution, eroticisation and indefinite commercial exploitation. Other religious observances, by contrast, are approached with respect, solemnity and caution. For instance, I struggle to imagine a major retailer launching sweets designed to be cheeky or suggestive for Eid al–Fitr or some other important religious celebration for a minority group – and quite rightly so.

On the one hand, I see the liberties that our confectionery manufacturers, Pontiffs of the modern calendar, take with Christian holy days as a tacit acknowledgement that ours is a Christian country, despite what the naysayers may believe. I take solace in the fact that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. On the other hand, if respect is the right instinct where sacred matters are concerned, why is it so often suspended when it comes to Christianity, treated as a pretext for novelty gifts and commercially opportunistic nonsense?

I enjoy a good Easter egg as much as anyone, especially one indecently full of hazelnut or pistachio cream. However, I also find that chocolate eggs are best enjoyed liberally after fasting for Lent, and best purchased in classical, inoffensive shapes no earlier than one week before. Feasting is more satisfying when it follows restraint and is kept to a narrow time– window. And true joy is more fulfilling when it has actual meaning and substance and is not the product of confectionery marketing departments.

So by all means keep the chocolate. Keep the family meals, the flowers, the laughter, the days off, and even the lip–shaped absurdities if you must have them. But let us at least be honest about the utter pointlessness of having every holiday blend into the next in one big year–long chocolate orgy. It is not making our culture more festive or cheerful; it is making it less capable of celebrating anything at all.

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