Yesterday, on Orthodox Easter Monday (April 13th) we officially surpassed 200 signatures, a monumental milestone which means this is one of the most prominent and top 10 current campaigns on change.org!
While the primary goal is to force policymakers and churches to fix Easter to March 22nd in forthcoming years such as 2043, 2054 or 2065, creating this petition itself has been an achievement on its own because I have shared my story about celebrating Easter on March 22nd 2026 with 200+ people I have never (I only know two of my supporters in person, excluding myself the campaigner)!
Seeing signs for “Easter Sunday – April 5th” in shops made me feel really alienated, was disorientating and literally had an “Alice in Wonderland-y” kind of feel because the whole world was two weeks out of sync with my personal liturgical calendar which certainly was not a nice feeling. As an analogy, it had the same effect as so-called jet lag, when daylight and darkness cycles no longer align with your circadian rhythm after travelling across multiple time zones so that’s how it felt when my personal liturgical calendar didn’t align with the rest of the world so an unpleasant feeling.
May will mark the end of this awful April and at the end of the month (25th May) will be the anniversary of coming across that infamous Reddit post which inspired me to launch this campaign just after my 33rd birthday in February (two days before my “Mothering Sunday”).
That infamous Reddit post on the BarbaraWalters4Scale thread also itself refuses to acknowledge that millions of Orthodox Christians alive today HAVE already seen their version of a “March 22nd” earliest Easter on the Julian calendar (2010) so it instead should have been titled “No one alive today has seen or will ever see Easter occur on March 22nd on the GREGORIAN calendar” because the post itself unfairly excludes the Orthodox minority!
Literally anyone over 43 years old (including Western Christians) has already unknowingly lived through Orthodox Easter on both its earliest and latest dates but because Western Christians don’t observe these holidays as their official Easter dates, 99.9% of them are unaware of it!
Sunday 8th May 1983 for us/them was just another regular insignificant Sunday in May and Sunday April 4th 2010 was just a standard mid-range Easter date for Western Christians, the only interesting mid-range date is April 8th (the middle date itself) which I experienced in 2007 and 2012 either side of the second-earliest (2008) and second-latest (2011) years.
Referring to my previous update, in years such as 2024 it is NOT the five-week date gap itself that’s the issue, it’s the lack of inclusivity for Orthodox/Coptic holidays in countries like the UK which exacerbates during those such years. Keeping Easter stock in UK and US shops until May and parks continuing to host Easter events such as Easter trails and egg hunts until May is all it takes to better accommodate the needs of the Orthodox minority residing in these countries!
Although I personally celebrated Easter on March 22nd not April 12th (Orthodox Easter) this year because of my obsession with dates, I feel I have “put my foot in an Orthodox Christian’s shoes” for celebrating Easter at a different time to the majority of the UK with no accompanying bank holiday. I was very lucky as “my Easter” came before the dreaded official “Alice” date so there were plenty of Easter eggs available but I now understand that in years when the Orthodox Easter date is significantly later than the Western one (like 2024), seasonal stock will have long since been cleared out by the time the Orthodox holiday arrives.
1983 and 2008 were the real problem years because not only was there a five-week gap between the two sets of Easter celebrations (meaning that all seasonal stock had long since been removed from UK/US shops) but there was also no accompanying bank holiday for Orthodox Easter Monday forcing those observers to use unnecessary annual leave (which occurred one week before the Early May bank holiday in 2008 and one week after it in 1983).
Reaching this level of support on change.org has really helped me as an individual and has made me feel less alienated in my personal March 22nd 2026 Easter celebration in getting my very personal story heard.
Although Orthodox Christians have an “unfair advantage” over Western Christians in the frequency of their extremely early and late Easter dates, at the same time they are unfairly disadvantaged by the lack of official recognition for their holidays/observances in countries like the UK, The Republic of Ireland, the USA, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.
Together, we can fix the inability for living Western Christians to see Easter earlier than the “too late to be early” March 25th and the complete lack of recognition and “non-existant” Orthodox holidays in Western countries!
I have even exceeded the signature count of another one of my petitions which I started four weeks earlier and that specific one had already exceeded 100 signatures before I created THIS ONE!
Everyone has places they would like to travel to and holiday plans each year, so rather than waiting until 2160 for the next Gregorian March 23rd Easter, I would suggest to simply book a holiday to Greece (The Land of the Extreme Easter Dates) for April 5th 2037 and join the Greeks in experiencing their second-earliest Easter date!
Its quite ironic that Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, the Greek mythology action film Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and the UK’s Equality Act all came out in 2010!
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, both Western an Orthodox Christians had boring Easter dates in 2020!