Easter 2013 years later in Australia

My first conscious half hour today, Good Friday 2013, was occupied by a radio program where people rang in to talk about what fish they planned to celebrate with today.

I thought that Good Friday, if one acknowledges it, was sober sort of day where one reflected on the death of Christ, maybe went to a church service and ate a simple vegetarian or fish meal in lieu of the meat one might normally eat.

This is apparently not so for today's Ozzie radio listeners. They were comparing notes as to how much they had paid for flathead fillets, oysters or marinara mix and detailing recipes for cooking fish fillets. They were going off to bar-b q' s and all sorts of what sounded like celebrations and fishy banquets. A discussion on the availability and sourcing of fish for Australians followed. A fisheries expert told 2 radio presenters to their surprise that Australia was surrounded by a marine desert which supported little in the way of fishy biomass.

What are we doing in Australia that we would seemingly celebrate the most mournful day on the Christian calendar with the over eating of a resource that is obviously scarce locally?

There were also descriptions of today's events with Easter eggs as prizes. I thought Easter eggs were for Easter Sunday, a happy day celebrating Christ’s resurrection.

It seems that in Australia, the cue to celebrate is nothing to do with religion but the fact that we have a few days holiday. The actual significance of Good Friday is now corrupted into a rather Bogan sounding, Sylvania Waters, Kath and Kim celebration. Maybe they do it complete with Baileys Irish crème.

Do the Jewish or Muslim celebrations become as confused? Does any of it matter?

Candobetter Editor's comment: That's not the half of it. Easter signifies the end of winter and the beginning of Spring - hence the eggs, as in things get born in Spring. It is mad to celebrate Spring, in Australia, as we do through Easter, in Autumn, heading for winter.

What Quark describes here sounds like an added conflation of crassly commercialised foodie swarming. This explains why I hardly ever listen to radio or turn on TV at these times.

We can only look forward to worse, at Christmas, when the European festival marked the middle of winter, when presumably people tried to pool their resources to survive - hence all those preserves: hams and fruitcakes. In Australia - and Costa Rica (another hot place with much threatened biodiversity) - we mark this event in mid-summer.

The disorientation that accompanies colonialism and globalism is very far reaching, especially when commercialised. Soon we will be compelled by law to consume festively 365 days a year as Christmas runs into Rammadan.