By Karen Y. Stevens

I don’t know about your house, but at my house we always seem to have some type of pork on Easter. I make a mean pork loin, which we usually have. This year I bought a spiral ham from one of the neighbor kids that was participating in a fund raiser for Bridge City School. I hope it’s good.

I wondered why a lot of people have pork on Easter and I found out that “meats” have seasons. Who knew? Before refrigeration, it was best to slaughter pigs in the cold months, so they could process the meat without it going bad due to the temperature. They say in the Fall, pigs were fed apples and all sorts of harvest foods, which makes the meat taste better. Now, they butcher pigs year-round, but still say they taste better in the Fall/Spring.

What blows me away about this holiday is that it is the most important Christian holiday, yet the celebration doesn’t compare to our Christmas celebrations? What’s up with that? Jesus’s death on the cross is what saved us, not His birth.

Yes, it was a miracle birth, but it was an even bigger miracle of the resurrection. I guess it’s like the chicken and the egg question? If He wasn’t born, then He couldn’t have died for us.

The National Retail Federation estimates that Americans will collectively spend $17.3 billion on clothing, food, decorations, and other holiday items this Easter. We’ll spend $2.4 billion strictly on candy for the holiday.

No wonder I’m diabetic, along with 29 million other Americans.

They also estimated $465 billion was spent on Christmas in 2017. That’s a difference of 447 billion dollars spent more on Christmas, than Easter. It appears to me that the Retail Markets are the ones that sway us on how we will celebrate a holiday. They are the ones that pump up what they think is important; whatever will get the most bang for their buck. I’m not saying it’s all their fault. We are just as much to blame. We cave under pressure all the time.

It’s sad we don’t celebrate the holiday for what it is, not what it has become.

One year, I decorated my front lawn with 3 medium crosses, and an assortment of bunnies and eggs. The crosses were wire, and you could hardly see them. My neighbors made fun of me, and said it looked like a graveyard. I have gone to one small, wooden cross instead of the 3 wire ones. The neighbors seemed to be happy even though I feel like I somewhat caved on what I had.

I look at the bunnies and eggs as Spring decorations.

The cross; I look at it as my salvation, the most significant reminder and testimony, of what Jesus did for me.

Karen Y. Stevens is founder of Orange County Christian Writers Guild