My childhood memories of Easter are few and far between. I remember being bundled up for an occasional sunrise service, and I recall a few Easter egg hunts around the yard, but that’s about it.

As much as anything, though, I remember being puzzled. Who came up with the idea of getting up in the dark to have church services at sunrise? That certainly held no appeal for me. Nor did Easter egg hunts, especially when the kids who were bigger and older than me found all the good ones first. For a while my family kept a few rabbits in cages behind the garage, and even at my young age I had figured out that rabbits didn’t lay eggs, so why pretend that they did?

All in all, Easter was puzzling. My parents found it puzzling, too, and it wasn’t long before they stopped celebrating the holiday.

Their reasons were simple. They found that the only time the word “Easter” is found in the Bible is in Acts 12:4 (in the King James Version)—but that the actual original word there is the Greek word for Passover. Easter really doesn’t appear there at all, but was inserted by a confused translator. So where did Easter come from?

They looked in several encyclopedias to learn about the origins of Easter and its traditions. They quickly came to see that sunrise services, rabbits and eggs were part of the ancient worship of the Babylonian fertility goddess Ishtar—whose name is preserved today in the word Easter—and that these customs and symbols were common in pagan religion long before Christianity came on the scene.

Digging further into the Bible, they saw in Deuteronomy 12:29-32 that God commands His people not to worship Him with the customs and practices that other peoples used in worshipping their false gods, and that God calls such traditions an abomination—something He detests and refuses to accept.

So they stopped. No more Easter for them!

Their search led them to discover that a lot of the practices commonly thought to be from the Bible actually had very dubious origins that had nothing to do with Christianity!

This learning process took time—several years, in fact. They also looked in the Bible to try to figure out how to fit the three days and three nights Jesus promised He would be in the tomb (Matthew 12:40) between a Good Friday crucifixion and an Easter Sunday resurrection. They learned that it just didn’t work—that the most you can come up with is two nights, a day, and a small part of another day.

A turning point came when they realized that the Bible reveals a series of festivals and Holy Days that spell out God’s plan for humankind, and how these teach us about Jesus Christ’s role in that plan—and that while Jesus, the apostles and the early Church celebrated these days, they’ve been largely ignored by traditional Christianity for the last 2,000 years. My parents began keeping these instead.

Thanks to their diligence in searching out what the Bible really teaches about such things, and leading me to examine matters for myself, I haven’t had to unlearn a lot of wrong assumptions and teachings that simply aren’t true. I’ve studied these same things in great depth, and we share the key details with you in this issue.

So what about you? Where do you get your beliefs? Have you checked up on them to see if they agree with God’s divinely revealed Word, the Bible? If not, isn’t it about time you started?