There are various reasons for this.  For a start, after what seems to have been endless winter, grey skies, dark evenings, cold winds, rain, a bit of snow, the weather gives us all sorts of signs that summer will come again and that Spring is here. There are daffodils all over the place, lambs in the fields and, praise the Lord, longer evenings at last. We've even sat with a cup of tea in the garden a couple of times!  Generally, there's a new feeling in the air,  a new joy in living at this annual ‘coming to life' of the earth after the death of winter. 
 
What more wonderful time then could there be to celebrate the greatest of all miracles, the one on which the whole Christian faith is based, the Resurrection of Christ, with its triumphant assertion that God raised Jesus from the dead after the powers of wickedness had, by nailing him to a Cross and
sealing his body in the tomb, done their best to deal with him once and for all.
 
But on the third day God raised him to new and glorious life!  And because of this we may know for all time that we have a God who brings new things out of old, good things out of bad and that death can never again be seen as the end, but as a gateway into a glorious risen life with God.
 
When the Christian faith reached England there was already a pagan fertility cult based on the Spring Goddess, Eostre, and as Christianity became more and more widespread, the pagan feast was taken over by the feast of the Resurrection which in England became known as Easter. 
 
One of the features of the worship of the goddess Eostre, was the egg, a symbol of new life hatching out in the Spring, bursting out of the shell, and so eggs too became part of the Easter celebrations.  Nowadays in this country, alas, while Easter eggs remain everywhere, it's sad to read in a newspaper
survey that less than 40% of people know the reason for this greatest of all festivals.
 
May you all have a joyful Eastertide as, with the awakening earth, we celebrate the new life that God has given us in the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Rev Clive Slaughter