Easter: You're doing it wrong.

So, today is Easter, which is all about chocolate and jellybeans one of two days a year you go to church not Christmas.

To help you understand some of the differences between these two holidays, I've put together this half-assed handy guide.

AWARENESS

We spend months and months preparing for Christmas, but Easter sneaks up on us every fucking year.

This is how you find out it's Christmas:

October 31:
While staggering walking down the street dressed as a Slutty Sexy Something-or-Other, you glance in a store window and see a fiber-optic tree and some fake snow, which you promptly forget about once you black out.

November 1:
The faint memory of an unnamed horror gnaws at the back of your mind until you recover from your hangover and venture out, only to hear Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer playing in the mall.

Thanksgiving Day:
FOOD COMA. Today is the official beginning of the winter wealthfest holiday season. Probably, you put up your huge fuckoff cat toy Christmas tree this evening. Also, the Führer of the Socialist Liberals for Satan Party declares the War on Christmas (again).

The Day After Thanksgiving:
Today is the biggest fucking spend-orgy in the world. It's called Black Friday because you wake up in total darkness to savesaveSAVE on GREAT DEALS! and because of the black coffee you need to drink to drag your ass out of bed early enough to win at materialism. For the entire rest of the fucking year, you will hear so much Christmas music that you will actually begin to resent joy.

December 1:
You get an Advent calendar—one of those things with 25 little doors that's supposed to teach you Patience and help you count down to Christmas through cheap, shitty chocolate—and you open the door labeled "1."

December 2:
You tell Patience to go fuck itself and open doors 2-25 and gorge yourself on cheap, shitty chocolate. You don't need help counting down to Christmas because from here on out, your TV will tell you how many shopping days you've got left. Every. Fucking. Day.

December 24:
All regular TV programming is cancelled and replaced with a million last-minute shopping reminders that say ZOMGWALMARTAMAZONBESTBUYMACY'SFORTHELOVEOFGODBUYMORESHIT! At 6pm, you switch to TBS and watch A Christmas Story TWELVE TIMES IN A ROW!!!

December 25:
You wake up and distribute an entire The Price Is Right showcase to everyone in your house, just to prove you totally care more about them than other people do celebrate the birth of the Savior. YOU WIN AT CHRISTMAS! Probably, somebody mentions Jesus, and the name sounds vaguely familiar.

Usually, you find out it's Easter when you have this phone conversation on a Saturday evening:

Relative: So we'll be over after church tomorrow, probably around twelve-thirty, one o'clock.
You: ...the fuck for?
Relative: Easter. You know, ham. Chocolate eggs.
You: Um, shit.

Then you spend the next twelve hours frantically cleaning your house, because you haven't done it since they came over for Christmas.

THE PARTY

Unless I misunderstood, the whole point of Christianity was that Jesus came here as a human, tried to teach us not to be selfish douchetards, and then sacrificed himself to save our sorry asses. Without Easter, Christmas means exactly nothing. It's like if Superman ended as soon as he reached Earth. Nobody gets saved from anything, he just fucking shows up and then the credits roll. There's a guaranteed fucking Oscar winner.

It's like football fans having a huge party to kick off the season, with like 30 kegs of beer and celebrities and all that food that Jesus told us to share with the poor. Everybody's screaming and cheering and spraying champagne all over. Somebody throws Gatorade on the Pope. And your team hasn't even played one fucking game yet. It's the beginning of the season; nothing's happened yet. You're not even in the stadium. You're still tailgating. That's Christmas in America, every year.

Then, a few months later, it's the Super Bowl. You've played you ass off and fought your way through the playoffs. In the first quarter of the game, it's that scene with Lawrence Taylor and Joe Theisman, and you know it's fucking over. Your star quarterback will never even walk again. But then, somehow, right at the two-minute warning, he strides back onto the field and plows through everyone by himself to win the Super Bowl. This is what the whole season was for, and you were in the kitchen getting another beer. You're like "what happened? I only watch this for the commercials. We won? Whatever, yeah, that's great, I guess. Man, did you see that one with the Vader kid? That was awesome!" That's how we celebrate Easter.

YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG

The only thing that makes sense about this is that you can market the shit out of Christmas. We've latched onto this one throwaway line in the story about gifts, and it's exploded completely out of control. We've got advertisements like "Where did the Wise Men get their gifts? Well, if they were really wise men, they came to Macy's After Thanksgiving Sale for our fantastic Doorbuster specials! First hundred customers get a bag of myrrh and an MP3 player! Doors open 3 B.C. Don't forget, if you don't buy, Jesus will cry."

But you can't market Easter, because it's a botched assassination attempt. It's like celebrating John Wilkes Booth Day or Lee Harvey Oswald Day. So instead, we've just got pastel eggs and chocolate rabbits, because that was the best sales pitch anyone could come up with.

Anyway, happy Easter. Or if you don't celebrate Easter, then at least maybe you don't have to work today.