How To Celebrate The Fifty Days

The current renewal of Easter (Pascha) has not only recovered the festal character of Sunday and of the special events of the Christian year, but the celebratory character of the entire season. This article challenges the church to make pascha a full fifty-day experience of Resurrection joy. A Week of Sundays: Celebrating the Great Fifty Days Celebrating Easter for fifty days is a Christian practice almost as ancient as the annual observance of Easter. Almost as soon as Christians began observing an annual feast in honor of Christ's resurrection, they extended the celebration for fifty days, or seven weeks. Moreover, this "Great Fifty Days," as it is sometimes called, predated the observance of a day of Pentecost by nearly two hundred years. In fact, the term Pentecost was first used by Christians to refer to this seven-week period as a unit: "the Pentecost," or the fifty days. It was only later that the term was applied to the fiftieth day, at which time then the fifty days was cal…