by Philip Eden

The great variability in Easter weather is only partly due to natural meteorological fluctuation. The obscure logic which has this particular Christian holiday wandering around the calendar also makes a contribution. The present arrangement for calculating the date of Easter was agreed in the fourth century and states that Easter Day is the Sunday following the first full moon after March 20. Thus Easter Sunday can fall on any date from March 22 to April 25 inclusive.

Some March Easters have been very wintry indeed. Those of 1986 and 1978 brought vigorous winds, hailstorms, thunder and lightning, while that of 1975 was one of the coldest and snowiest Easters of the twentieth century. Another snowy Easter happened in 1983, and this was a comparatively early one too. The hills of northeast England and the north Midlands had a period of snow late on Good Friday, April 1, and the following afternoon a belt of snow spread southwards across Scotland leaving eastern districts under several inches. In the Home Counties and East Anglia heavy falls caused problems that evening, and by Easter morning much of Essex and Kent lay under a blanket of snow four to six inches thick.

These snowy early Easters routinely raise the question whether this particular holiday should be fixed - maybe to the middle weekend of April. Implicit in this is the expectation that the weather is more reliable in mid-April than it is in late-March. Statistically it is true that on average temperatures are a few degrees higher, frost and snow are marginally less likely, and - often forgotten - there is an hour more daylight so the evenings are lighter. But snowy weekends are far from unknown even in the middle of April. Harold Wilson's 1966-70 government fixed the Whitsun bank holiday to the last weekend in May so it should come as little surprise that parliament has already debated fixing Easter. What may raise a few eyebrows is that it happened way back in 1928 and an appropriate Act of Parliament was passed. However it included a clause requiring agreement by the various Christian churches. Presumably they are still thinking about it.