Sunday opening is still constrained, although seemingly by labour MPs for unions, and Easter Sunday seems to be still betrothed to the church, even though it’s the Celtic festival of spring.
Various clerical abuses/scandals probably played the real lead role, if you ask most people. You can always convincingly argue for "one damned thing after another" as the real engine of history. There's also the plain fact that the BBC interview involved an entirely different church in a different country, which is points againt my version.
..That's why I say symbolic.
That interview just feels like the magic is gone, curtain is pulled or pick your metaphor. Suddenly (it seemed to take them by surprise) the bishop was just an old man in silly clothes who couldn't make a relevant argument, didn't seem like an authority and wouldn't be taken more seriously than the comedians who's film had interesting commentary, besides being funny and entertaining.
It captured a moment, imo. I also like python... so bias.
British produced and made, Irish written and acted. Guess it depends on your defintion of an Irish show but you can be sure that if something is funny, RTE had absolutely nothing to do with it.
But the semantics changes substantially with different religions, only dates, abstract motions, and symbols remained (seldom the symbolisms, meanings, etc).
Which is why pointing that this or that custom was adopted from an earlier religion doesn't say much about it's new role -- some skeptics seem to go like "it was adopted, so it's fake" and can't fathom that it just means it was convenient and served a role for both religions, nor that the role can be completely different, even if the date is the same.
Like if we replaced Xmas on Dec 25, but kept the date as a new holiday of a new religion, say, "The day of buying gifts". So, instead of the message of god becoming man, redemption, love, etc, it would mean "time to indulge ourselves with crap, and buy some token BS for others to keep the market moving". Hmm, wait, we already did that.
At this remove it seems just about impossible to pick apart, let alone identify the previous significance.
Easter, however, is conceptually linked to Passover, since it commemorates Christ's death at Passover and subsequent resurrection [1].
Easter's actual date is highly variable and notoriously aggravating to compute, though [2]. For reasons I do not know, the church did not want to just say "the first Sunday following Passover."
If this wikipedia link is to believed she may also have been the origin of Easter hares and rabbits.
https://historyforatheists.com/2017/04/easter-ishtar-eostre-...
Now, the hares and rabbits and all, that's obviously not from Christian tradition or the Bible. That's clearly a regional adaptation of adopting a local tradition into the Christian celebration. This is a typical way to assimilate a culture. Reuse their traditions, but rebrand them (change masks of pagan gods or entities to be saints, change the parade to focus on the Christian symbols, etc.).
There's probably a long tradition of people in Europe associating March and April with hares, but I don't think there's anything particularly "pagan" about it.
It wouldn't surprise me if the pre-indo-european cultures of the area also had the same symbols for whatever religions they practiced.
The fertility symbols of spring have very little to do with Christianity, and I can't see where they are even made part of the theology. So looking backwards from a thousand years later, it seems like the pagan religions did recognize them as fertility symbols and rites. Even if those symbols have always been there, it feels like the pagans used them to make sense of their world in a way that Christians haven't.
The Easter bunny has about as much to do with Christianity (or pagan religions) as Santa Claus.
So yeah, I'm sure you can loosely trace lots of this stuff back into the distant past. My point was just that this isn't an instance of Christianity taking over or "rebranding" some older pagan tradition.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_particular_churches_a...
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3147.htm
I don't know when/how the tradition changed.
Holy Week (preceding Easter) and Easter itself are full of themes and symbolism, but the focus is different — it's square on the mysteries of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
See for example the Exsultet[3] and the Victimae paschali laudes[4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogation_days
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ember_days
See:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/paschal
https://www.etymonline.com/word/Easter?ref=etymonline_crossr...
Most Christians of course don't, which is why we think of the above as Christian holidays even though some Christians find something objectionable.
There's actually quite a bit of history and uncertainty re: December 25.
See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas#Choice_of_December_2...
The only “Christians” (the application of this label to them is controversial within Christianity) that take this approach are Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and some related groups, who share the trait of rejecting the concept of holidays (with the exception of, or as distinguished from, the regular Sabbath). I know of no Christian group that rejects Christmas for pagan ties and refers to Easter in the way you describe.
I know of several other Christian groups today who don't. The ones you mention are the only ones anyone is likely to recognize without personally knowing someone in the church. It isn't only about rejecting holidays.