How come Easter is always on a Sunday but Christmas is always on the specific date?

: How come Easter is always on a Sunday but Christmas is always on the specific date?
Why is it that Easter always is on a Sunday, so it can fall on a different date year to year, but for Christmas there is a specific date pinned down, December 25, no matter what day of the week it falls on? Just curious.

Answers and Views:

Answer by Ethan
Because Christmas is based around winter solstice, while Easter is based around the phase of the moon.

Therefore Easter can change each year, while Christmas stays the same date.

Answer by Bobby Jim
Easter is a moveable feast. Associated loosely with Passover, Passover is based upon the lunar calendar. Easter is based upon a litergical calendar.

Answer by Ravenfire
Both of those dates are estimations. Many arguments have come forward to prove those dates wrong. Easter is always on Sunday because Jesus was crucified on Friday and rose from the dead three days later on the first day of the week. Yes, the first day of the week is Sunday not Monday.

Answer by Paul
The date for Easter was set as the first Sunday following the first full moon after March 21st. (previously it was set to the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox but this was changed to March 21st for simplicity).

Originally the christian celebration of Easter was set to coincide with the Jewish celebration of passover but it was changed to coincide with a full moon so that parishioners could more safely navigate their way home. Remember in those days there was no street lighting.

Answer by Gone beyond
Easter is a Moon feast dedicated to the Goddess Oestre. It was absorbed into the Christian calendar to help the process of bringing pagan faiths into the roman catholic faith.
Christmas is a construct which was developed by the Roman Empire to help them subjugate people in the name of religion. The date of the Birth of the Messiah is based on the date of the Ancient Roman God Mithras.

Answer by Alvin
The feast of Easter is linked to the Jewish Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread, as the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus occurred at the time of those observances.

As early as Pope Sixtus I, some Christians had set Easter to a Sunday in the lunar month of Nisan. To determine which lunar month was to be designated as Nisan, Christians relied on the Jewish community. By the later 3rd century some Christians began to express dissatisfaction with what they took to be the disorderly state of the Jewish calendar. They argued that contemporary Jews were identifying the wrong lunar month as the month of Nisan, choosing a month whose 14th day fell before the spring equinox.[31] Christians, these thinkers argued, should abandon the custom of relying on Jewish informants and instead do their own computations to determine which month should be styled Nisan, setting the Easter festival within this independently-computed, Christian Nisan, which would always locate the festival after the equinox. They justified this break with tradition by arguing that it was in fact the contemporary Jewish calendar that had broken with tradition by ignoring the equinox, and that in former times the 14th of Nisan had never preceded the equinox.[32] Others felt that the customary practice of reliance on the Jewish calendar should continue, even if the Jewish computations were in error from a Christian point of view.[33]

The controversy between those who argued for independent computations and those who argued for continued reliance on the Jewish calendar was formally resolved by the Council, which endorsed the independent procedure that had been in use for some time at Rome and Alexandria. Easter was henceforward to be a Sunday in a lunar month chosen according to Christian criteria—in effect, a Christian Nisan—not in the month of Nisan as defined by Jews. Those who argued for continued reliance on the Jewish calendar (called “protopaschites” by later historians) were urged to come around to the majority position. That they did not all immediately do so is revealed by the existence of sermons,[34] canons,[35] and tracts[36] written against the protopaschite practice in the later 4th century.

These two rules, independence of the Jewish calendar and worldwide uniformity, were the only rules for Easter explicitly laid down by the Council. No details for the computation were specified; these were worked out in practice, a process that took centuries and generated a number of controversies. (See also Computus and Reform of the date of Easter.) In particular, the Council did not decree that Easter must fall on Sunday. This was already the practice almost everywhere.[37] Nor did the Council decree that Easter must never coincide with Nisan 15 (the first Day of Unleavened Bread, now commonly called “Passover”) in the Hebrew calendar. By endorsing the move to independent computations, the Council had separated the Easter computation from all dependence, positive or negative, on the Jewish calendar. The “Zonaras proviso”, the claim that Easter must always follow Nisan 15 in the Hebrew calendar, was not formulated until after some centuries. By that time, the accumulation of errors in the Julian solar and lunar calendars had made it the de-facto state of affairs that Julian Easter always followed Hebrew. this is the reason why easter is a movable date while christmas is a fixed date

Answer by redeem the worthless
Easter wasn’t based on Georgian Calendar, while Xmas is a rough estimation, a day to celebrate, but does not mean it’s accurate.

Answer by greenshootuk
The festival of Easter goes back to the very early church when many Christians were Jewish converts. The Bible says that the resurrection happened on a Sunday around Passover time so those jewish Christians would celebrate Passover and then, on the following Sunday, they would celebrate the Resurrection. The Jewish calendar is lunar, based on the moon, and each month begins with a new moon which is why Easter moves around by up to a month between later March and late April.

The festival of Christmas was instituted a 100 years or so later. By this time, many more, perhaps most, Christians were Gentiles – non-Jews. Best evidence was that the date for Christmas most widely adopted, 25th December, came from the church in Rome so is based on the standard Roman calendar and the normal Roman practice of holding festivals on fixed dates, not fixed week days. Our modern calendar came from the Roman one.