1. A separate date

Easter is one of the two biggest Christian holidays worldwide, but it originated long before organized religion, as a celebration of spring, joy and rebirth. There's no fixed date in the calendar for it: in Western Christianity (the Catholic and Protestant denominations), according to the Gregorian calendar, Easter always falls on a Sunday between March 22^nd and April 25^th, following the first astronomical full moon after the spring equinox; Eastern Christianity, on the other hand, bases its calculations on the Julian Calendar, which is currently behind the Gregorian one by 13 days. Orthodox Easter therefore varies between April 4^th and May 8^th, so it rarely overlaps with the Western one, and mostly falls later in the year.

While we've been assaulted for weeks now by images of chocolate eggs and bunnies in store window displays, few Montrealers for whom Easter is a religious holiday seem to care much about the religious aspect of it - they just enjoy their day off, eat a lavish lunch and spend time with families. On the contrary, for Orthodox communities (mostly Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek and Coptic) in the city, this is the most important holiday of the year. It seems fitting that they would have a separate date to celebrate it.