Easter is one of the most widely celebrated holidays in the world, touching lives across continents, cultures, and belief systems. For many, it is a day of family gatherings, pastel-colored eggs, chocolate bunnies, and joyous springtime festivities. For others, especially within Christian traditions, it is the holiest day of the year; a profound observance of resurrection and eternal hope. But beneath the eggs and lilies, beyond the sunrise services and candy baskets, lies a much older and richer tapestry of meaning. To understand Easter in its truest form, one must explore not just what it is today, but where it came from, and what it originally stood for.

Easter’s Ancient Roots: A Festival of Fertility and Renewal

Long before the emergence of Christianity, civilizations marked the arrival of spring with festivals celebrating life, fertility, and renewal. One of the earliest influences on the Easter tradition can be traced to ancient pagan celebrations centered on the vernal equinox; a time when day and night stand in perfect balance, and nature begins to bloom again after the cold stillness of winter.

A notable figure often linked with Easter’s earliest origins is Ēostre (also spelled Ostara), a Germanic goddess of dawn, fertility, and spring. According to the Venerable Bede, a 7th-century Anglo-Saxon historian, the month of April was named after this goddess in his region, and a festival in her honor marked the rebirth of nature each year. Symbols associated with Ēostre, such as the egg (representing life and birth) and the hare (a symbol of fertility), remain central to Easter celebrations even today.

While the historical documentation around Ēostre is limited and debated, many scholars agree that spring festivals celebrating rebirth and fertility were common across pre-Christian Europe and the Middle East. From the Babylonian celebration of Ishtar to the Egyptian reverence of Osiris, resurrection stories were embedded in ancient mythologies long before they took Christian form.

The Christian Transformation: Resurrection and Redemption

When Christianity began to spread across Europe and beyond, it encountered these existing spring festivals and slowly recontextualized them within its own theological narrative. The resurrection of Jesus Christ, which, according to the New Testament, occurred three days after his crucifixion, became the central story around which the Easter holiday was shaped.

Early Christians did not initially agree on when to celebrate the resurrection, but by the 4th century, the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) established Easter as the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox. This alignment with lunar and seasonal cycles hints at the blending of Christian doctrine with earlier pagan calendrical practices.

For Christians, Easter is the culmination of Holy Week, following Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday (commemorating the Last Supper), and Good Friday (marking the crucifixion). The resurrection symbolizes victory over sin and death, offering believers the promise of eternal life. It is a moment of spiritual awakening, hope, and divine love; profoundly sacred to billions of people around the world.

What Easter Has Become Today: A Celebration Reimagined

In the modern era, Easter has evolved into a complex fusion of the sacred and the secular. Churches are filled with lilies and hymns, while department stores brim with chocolate rabbits, marshmallow chicks, and brightly colored baskets. For many families, the holiday is less about religion and more about tradition; a time to gather, feast, and enjoy the changing of the seasons.

The Easter Bunny, originally derived from European folklore about the spring hare, has become a fixture in popular culture. The tradition of hiding eggs and gifting candy has become a playful symbol of renewal and joy, especially for children. Even non-Christians often partake in the lighter aspects of the holiday, appreciating its themes of rebirth, community, and delight.

However, this commercialization has also led to a dilution of Easter’s deeper spiritual and symbolic significance. Just as Christmas has been overshadowed by consumerism, Easter too has, for many, become more about sales, sweets, and social media photos than resurrection and rebirth. But beneath the surface, its ancient heartbeat still echoes.

Bridging the Past and Present: Rediscovering the Essence of Easter

To truly honor Easter is to recognize its layered history; a meeting point of ancient wisdom and spiritual revelation. Whether one celebrates the resurrection of Christ or the cyclical return of spring, Easter calls us to a deeper awareness of transformation, hope, and new beginnings.

It is a time to reflect on the miracle of life itself; how light emerges from darkness, how seeds sprout from soil, how love triumphs over fear. It’s about rising from the ashes of personal winters, stepping forward into light, and embracing the eternal promise of renewal.

In its truest and most genuine meaning, Easter is not just a day. It is a state of being. A call to rise. A celebration of life’s eternal rhythm.

A Personal Message from Me

Easter always used to mean something else. A pastel dress, perhaps a little too itchy. Patent shoes that pinched. Plastic grass in a wicker basket. Ham. Church pews packed with people wearing their Sunday best and smiling a little too tightly. As a little girl in the South, Easter was as much performance as it was tradition. I understood its religious framing well enough, the story of the resurrection, the promise of salvation, the white lilies on the altar, but beneath that understanding was a longing for something else. Something quieter. Wilder. More real.

I didn’t know it then, but I was already beginning to crave the freedom I now live.

Today, my Easter morning looks nothing like those of my childhood, nor the years that followed when I tried to fit into a life that was never meant for me. There is no dress, no shoes, no clothes at all, most of the time. Just my pale skin kissed by the first golden light, and the feel of cool earth beneath my bare feet. My home is my 1973 GMC Eleganza motorhome, parked somewhere off-grid, perhaps beside a lake hidden in a pine forest, or in the open stillness of the high desert. My altar is nature herself. My church is the wind, the sun, the songbirds returning after winter.

Easter has become something sacred again; not because of doctrine, but because of how intimately I live with the seasons.

In the old life, I lived by a calendar. Now, I live by the moon, the sun, the subtle cues of nature: how the wind shifts, when the first bees appear, how the air smells before the rain. Easter, in this wild and wandering life, has become a celebration not just of resurrection, but of reclamation. I have reclaimed my body from the expectations of society. I’ve reclaimed my time, my energy, my spirit. I’ve reclaimed my own narrative.

Living as a barefoot naturist nomad is a constant return to truth. It is shedding layers; literal and figurative. It is radical honesty with myself and my needs. I am not a person who thrives in structure or confinement. I am a person who blossoms in openness, in sunlit quiet, in wild places that ask nothing of me but presence.

Easter now is a pause. A breath. A remembering.
I remember the girl I was.
I honor the woman I’ve become.
And I celebrate the journey in between.

There have been many Easters since I chose this life; many dawns welcomed barefoot, many cups of coffee sipped under ancient trees, many moments of stillness where I felt, without question, that I was exactly where I was meant to be. This is a life most will never choose, but it is one I was born to live. I no longer need rituals to feel connected to the divine. I feel it when I wake with the birds, when I rinse in a cold river, when I watch the stars from a lonely canyon and feel no fear.

This Easter, I sit here, naked, sun-warmed, heart wide open, and I reflect not just on where I’ve been, but on how blessed I am to have followed the wild call within me. The one that said, there’s more. The one that led me here. To this sunrise. To this freedom.

And I want you to know: resurrection doesn’t have to look like a miracle. Sometimes it’s simply a woman choosing herself. Choosing truth. Choosing to step out of the life she was told to want, and into the one her soul quietly craved all along.

From wherever I am today, I send you love.
From the road. From the wild. From this quiet Easter morning.
May you find your own awakening, in whatever form it takes.