1. Who said: “Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.”
2. What determines the date of Easter?
3. Who wrote the poem Easter 1916 which concludes:
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
4. In which garden was Jesus when Judas pointed him out to the authorities?
5. Hot Cross buns and Easter eggs – a treat for this weekend, just another commercial opportunity or . . .?
Homepaddock 
1. I don’t know, but whoever said had clearly never read The Donkey, by G. K. Chesterton.
2. Easter Sunday is the first Sunday following the first full moon following the vernal equinox in the northern hemisphere. This is according to the Roman church. Medieveal historians will know that the method of determining Easter was a key point of dispute between the Celtic church and the Roman church, along with the appropriate tonsure for monks.
3. William Butler Yeats.
4. Gethsemane
5. Both. I’m quite capable of thinking two thoughts at once. In token of this, I make my own hot cross buns, but I buy chocolate Easter eggs.
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Bother! HTML fail, I’m sorry. So there’s now a very very long link to that poem.
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1. I’m guessing, but perhaps John Betjeman? Although whoever said it is not correct – John Masefield managed it.
2. The equinox, I think.
3. W B Yeats.
4. Gethesemane.
5. A bit of both – esp. if the hot cross buns are homemade.
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1.Sounds like something Christopher Hitchens might say.
2.Something to do with the Spring equinox.
3.Yeats
4.Gethsemane I suppose. The only garden in the Bible I can think of other than Eden.
5.We always do both. Little traditions are important.
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I for one appreciate the link though. I’d forgotten that one.
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(1)
(2) The first Council of Nicea determined it should be celebrated on the Sunday following the first full moon after the 21st of March which matched the vernal equinox in 325 AD (at Jerusalem).
A curiosity: the Western Church adjusted the calender to maintain the vernal equinox date as occurring on the 20th – 21st of March, which is our modern civil calender while the Eastern Church didn’t and maintains the same calander in use at Nicea, thus Easter this year is being celebrated in the West before the calender equinox of the East and a whole lunar cycle will have to take place before the Eastern Easter or Pascha is celebrated on May 5th
(3)
(4) The Garden of Gethsemane
(5) The Easter Baskets of my childhood – special bread with a candle on top, spicy sausage, homemade cheese and hand decorated hard boiled eggs, though now the foil covered marshmellow filled chocolate ones found their way in there as well.
This would/will be blessed by the priest in the early hours of Sunday morning,
There is deep significance to such a baskets contents, of course, but in an age when Easter eggs and hot cross buns go on sale in January this would be totally missed
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1] I don’t know. It has to be contemporary/post-war, but I don’t think that Hitchens would be it, because he would know of the poets. I’m beaten.
2] Sunday after full moon after the equinox.
3] William Butler Yeats
4] The Garden of Gethsemane.
5] A treat at this season.
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