THE Island business community is developing an annoying habit of going into snooze mode at Christmas and Easter.

Jersey noticeably started the run-up to Easter two weeks ago, even before the schools broke up. By Monday, one would hope, normal service will be resumed — at least until Les Grande Vacances in August.

The main reason for this seasonal economic slowdown is the necessity for parents to link family time or holidays to the school timetable. The school holidays bring joy to the hearts of those commuters who keep the wheels of industry turning while parents spent quality time with their children.

Driving into town each working day from the east is the most frustrating way to start the day, unless you time it just right by sandwiching your journey between the 7.30 am to 7.45 am rush and the school peak after 8 am. Hard-nosed commuters who live in the west know that it is in the best interests of their frayed nerves to hit the road before 7.30 am.

Come the school holidays, it’s plain sailing, with extra minutes at home and more parking spaces than you can shake a dipstick at.

In making the most of this Easter, I wonder how many of us gave any thought as to why we were given two extra days off work?

Apart from the Island’s Christian communities, how many understand the significance of this, the most important and extended season in the Christian calendar? The Easter season begins on Ash Wednesday — the first day of Lent — and ends 50 days after Easter Sunday on Pentecost.

We live in an increasingly secular society, yet it is one in which the established church, the Church of England, is woven into the fabric of political life more than in countries where religious holidays are observed with reverence and colourful displays of true faith.

Christmas today is more about consum-erism than the birth of Christianity, but it does still possess public religious dimensions. People who never go to church — unless it is for a christening, wedding or funeral — sing heartily at carol concerts or make the effort to attend midnight mass to herald Christmas Day.

There is a nativity scene in the Royal Square to remind frantic shoppers that the true meaning of Christmas is not to shop until they drop. We exchange greetings cards decorated with biblical scenes, angels and the Madonna and child without a second thought to the fundamental basis of Christianity in western legal codes and social mores. Yet how many people exchange Easter cards?

Easter passes by with little if any acknowledgment that it is an important annual religious feast in the Christian liturgical year.

Easter in 21st century Jersey has more do with the cocoa and sugar markets than with Christianity. At least at Christmas, God, Jesus and the full supporting cast, right down to the beasts in the stable, get a look in, but come Easter and it’s all about fluffy chicks, eggs of all sizes and chocolate bunnies.

At a push, the average man in the street can belt out the opening verses of a few Christmas carols, but how many can hum a few bars of ‘There is a Green Hill Far Away?’
This growing indifference to Easter extends to the false idol of the mass entertainment age: television. Last weekend presenters, newsreaders and weather forecasters repeatedly referred to the ‘long weekend’ and ‘bank holiday weekend’ but rarely to the Easter holiday.

At Christmas both the BBC and ITV broadcast a fair number of religious programmes and services; not so at Easter. Even the traditional Good Friday TV matinée has been elbowed out by the dictates of daytime scheduling. Good Friday 2009 — in the televisual sense — was the same as any other Friday.

But Good Friday is not the same as any day. Like Christmas Day, it is a religious holiday, not a bank holiday.

Easter Sunday saw token news coverage of services, a documentary about th Pope, and a flash of the Pope delivering his Easter message. But then, it was a slow news day.
You don’t have to be a practising Christian to regret the passing of traditions and the history that underpins not just those special days in the year, but also events that are part of our culture and define who we are.

Those who would like to put the Jesus factor back into Easter should take heart from the determination of the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who has decided that his city will next week be celebrating one very special saint’s day. Thursday 23 April is St George’s Day. St George is not just the patron saint of England, but also of Aragon, Catalonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Palestine, Portugal, Germany and Greece, and of Moscow, Istanbul, Genoa and Venice (second to St Mark).

He is also the patron saint of soldiers, archers, cavalry and chivalry, farmers and field workers, riders and saddlers, and he helps the Boy Scouts and those suffering from leprosy, plague and syphilis.

Countries all over the world celebrate their patron saint. Entire industries have grown up around St Patrick’s Day — so much so that you don’t even have to have visited Ireland, let alone have a drop of Irish blood coursing through your veins, to dress in green and sink a pint or two of the black stuff in his honour.

Yet in England, the strictest practitioners of political correctness consider it an affront to every other ethnic group for the English to celebrate St George’s Day. The chattering classes see the cross of St George as a symbol of the far right and football louts. Well, it’s time to wrench it back.

Thanks to Boris, such prejudices could be about to change. He has planned a week-long celebration of free events to put St George firmly back at the forefront of the English psyche and to make the English prize their patron saint as much as the Welsh, Scottish and Irish appreciate their own.

If St George’s Day can be resurrected, there is hope for Easter. After all, resurrection is what Easter is all about.