Today is the most sacred day in the Christian calendar.
When I look back to my childhood I remember going to church with my family in the morning and hot cross buns for tea in the evening but nothing in between.
We probably spent the day reading, playing or visiting or being visited. We didn’t have television and there wasn’t much else to do with shops and any places of entertainment like movie theatres closed.
These days Good Friday is just another holiday for many, although no doubt we’ll have the annual stupidity of Labour Department inspectors working to find retailers who shouldn’t be in some places although they could be in others.
As for hot cross buns, they’ve been in the shops since January.
I’ve maintained my one-woman protest against that by not buying any but am waiting for the dough for homemade ones to rise as I type.
They are for lunch with extended family which will be taking priority over blogging for the rest of the day.
Homepaddock 
Good for you Ele. Like you, blogging will slide down my list of priorities. But I swear I can smell your home-made hot cross bun dough all the way from Whanganui!
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I’m with you Ele, people don’t deserve a holiday if they don’t even know what it is all about, I wouldn’t call my self a die-hard (no pun intended) Christian but people should know these things just as a sign of a little bit of respect for each other…. if you ask around, you see a lot of blank faces when you ask if they know what happened on Good Friday…let alone White Thursday…..
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Look, I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but is this really “the most sacred day…”?
Surely the birth was a bigger, more sacred occasion.
Then, there’s the whole resurrection debacle. Without that, no resurrection, no resurrection no savior, no savior no Christianity.
And Dutchie, what DID happen on “good Friday”? Why isn’t the date fixed, like, you know, actual historical events? Xmas day never moves, Waitangi day never moves, only Easter moves. Why? To maintain its pagan ties.
Anyhoo, to me its another Friday; my working week is only Monday – Thursday. The religious can make their obeisances, the rest of us can enjoy a day with family and friends celebrating life, not death.
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LOL David – why are you humanists so pedantic.
Pascha or Easter is the greatest of the Feasts of the Church and there is a build up to it, starting with Lent, through Holy Week culminating with the Celebration of the Ressurection on Sunday.
And no the “birth” or Nativity is not the more sacred – indeed there are other feasts just as sacred, if not more Epiphany for example, though now forgotten by most was more prominant for many years.
As for the day being “movable” that is because Pascha is based on a lunar calender not a solar one. The solar calender in secular use has no more authority scientifically than any other system for marking time.
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“LOL David – why are you humanists so pedantic.”
Maybe because for us there is no higher truth, then, well, truth.
I don’t begrudge you your feasts and your famines, I agree that there is a place for myth and storytelling in humanity; just need to keep the myth separate from the fact.
“The solar calender in secular use has no more authority scientifically than any other system for marking time.”
Actually, the solar calendar is also used by the religious. It is only when it comes to Easter that they cling to the Lunar calendar, and even then the eastern and western branches cannot agree.The most sacred day in the xtian calendar and it cannot be determined accurately, indeed, it cannot be nailed down to an actual day.
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Of course David – the calender we use daily was after all bequeathed to the world by Pope Gregory XIII.
That embarrases those who beleive in the infallibility of scientific “truth” somewhat – so when labelling years according to this calender they use the awkward BCE/CE in place of the original BC/AD
It can be nailed down to an actual day because it is every year, the messyness of it moving between days reckoned according the civil calender might frustrate the rigid secular mind as does, the mind spinning for them, differences between the Papal calender and the Byzantine one..
The funny thing about scientific “truth”, David, is that most who put their faith in it do not recognize that all scientific “truths” are based on axioms which have to be taken as articles of faith, axioms which may or not be correct and are certainly always up for revision or even rejection and replacement.
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Now here is a funny thing about scientific truth, early in the 21st century learned scientists were telling us that by the second decade of this century snow falls in Great Britain would be a thing of the past due, they said, to Global Warming.
And yet here we are in March 2013 Anno Domini and the English Landscape is covered with snow while the unfornunate poor and elderly die of hypothermia.
Science is a great thing and a very useful tool but it is not the fountain of Truth, far from it in fact.
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