The following is intended only as a sort of informal “theological sketch” – I’m not hammering out a formal argument here, just doing some exploring.
I’m sympathetic to the (reasonably common) observation that there is an imbalance between the way many North American Christians celebrate Christmas and the way they celebrate Easter. Basically, the idea is that of the two central celebrations of the Christian year it is Easter, not Christmas, which should be the “big” one (i.e. we wouldn’t be aware of Jesus’ birth if not for his death and resurrection), but for many of us Christmas looms much larger in our imagination and lived experience. The “Easter Spirit” just never feels quite as contagious as the “Christmas Spirit.” The best place for me to observe this is, of course, in my own life as the years cycle through: often I eagerly anticipate Christmas but stumble distractedly into Easter.
There are some obvious reasons for the difference. A main one, much discussed and lamented, is that our culture has figured out ways to harness the iconography of Christmas as a marketing device to sell us a bunch of junk we don’t really need. And, um, we like stuff: we like it so much we usually don’t even realize how much we like it. Consumption is an (the?) idol at the center of our shared cultural life, and to the extent that our Christmas celebrations share in the worship of Our-Lady-of-Perpetual-Deals it is unsurprising that the Christmas holiday feels “bigger.” This again, is obvious, and maybe the answer to our question is that we just need to crucify our consumerism (even as our culture will keep doing its best to commercialize Easter) – but that’s easier said than done.
I think there are other reasons too, ones that are interesting to think about, and perhaps might provide some clues for celebrating better, if not “bigger.” Theologically it may be easier to sing “Joy to the World” at Christmas than “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” at Easter because the incarnation is God’s great affirmation and confirmation of creation. In the incarnation God enters into creation, into the particularity of it, and affirms it by being born as a baby. John 1’s echo of the creation story and Luke’s narrative describing the birth of Jesus both make the same theological point regarding the value and goodness of creation. So, there is a certain sort of theological harmony in the festival of Christmas being marked by an enjoyment of the creaturely goods of food, family bonds etc.
But, maybe I’ve just revealed myself to be some sort heretic who diminishes the significance of the resurrection? Isn’t the promise of new life, of new creation that much more powerful of a “yes” to God’s creatures than the quotidian mess of childbirth? If we celebrate a birth, how much more the defeat of death? There’s an existential element to this, I think. We all have some sense of familiarity with birth, and also, perhaps with death, but reports from the resurrected have been … rare. At Christmas we are remembering a birth, a joyful, life-affirming event; at Easter we are remembering a death … and a resurrection. In remembering the resurrection we’re remembering something we anticipate and hope for, something beyond our capacity to entirely understand, rather than something we know happens every hour at the hospital down the street (not that we understand birth and death particularly well, either). And at Easter there’s the horrific death there in the middle – the reality that there is no resurrection without the cross. Good Friday forces us to grapple with evil, death, judgment, suffering, sin, which tends to dampen the festival atmosphere one might find at Christmas. Yes, we find reason for hope in the resurrection, but the reality of Good Friday (and perhaps even more the flat “in-between” waiting of Holy Saturday) often feel easier to identify with than the wonder of the Resurrection Sunday and it would be perverse to try and ignore the importance of the cross in our attempts to celebrate Easter.
So, it’s not straightforward that the solution to a Christmas/Easter imbalance is to just make Easter “bigger.” The pleas from the pulpit on Easter Sunday to “Come on and be happy!” (usually delivered in more pious language) feel forced, at best. I think in part, we (I) struggle to recognize significance and meaning outside a limited emotional range in our shared life together. We can manage happy (Christmas Day – never mind that whole “Advent” thing), we can manage sad (Good Friday – thank goodness it’s only one day a year) and we have Easter (why aren’t you as happy as you were at Christmas?). I don’t think the goal should be to make Easter more like Christmas – trying to generate some sort of emotional response that isn’t really there – but rather to recover a richer, broader range of response as we try and faithfully remember and celebrate what God has done.