Firstly, may I thank everyone who has signed this campaign as you have helped me through a really difficult spring.
Creating this petition has been a way to share my personal and unique story about celebrating Easter on March 22nd 2026 with the world and to document my struggle with certain fixations and how they affect me as a neurodivergent individual, and to share my story about a very awful April I have faced.
Now that the awful anti-Easter Alice in Wonderland Day is over, I no longer have to cope with going into shops and seeing signs for “Easter on the wrong date” but as we are still currently in April it will take at least until May for my life to completely get back to normal.
After reading TripAdvisor travel reports late last year, as a homage to the Land of the Extreme Easter Dates where you can’t flush toilet paper, I decided to give up flushing toilet tissue for Lent and disposed my used toilet roll in plastic cat poop bags which was pretty gross!
My March 22nd 2026 Easter celebration felt real and official, we stayed home and watched the 1961 film King of Kings documenting the life of Jesus Christ and having a lamb roast dinner so seeing signs listed for the later date felt really disorienting, much like the effects of jet lag after flying across multiple time zones as I was effectively two weeks ahead of everyone else with my own personal liturgical clock.
Although my March 22nd 2026 celebration was self-inflicted, it has given me firsthand experience of what it feels like for the millions of Orthodox Christians who regularly celebrate Easter at different times and how disorienting it must feel for them in countries that predominantly follow Western traditions like the UK.
The lack of recognition and acknowledgement for my March 22nd 2026 celebration has, in a sense, also given me firsthand experience of the lack of recognition for Orthodox and Coptic holidays. As I said in my previous petition updates, it is NOT the use of the Julian calendar or the 5 week gap between the two Easter dates that’s the issue, it is the complete lack of recognition (non-recognition actually) for Coptic and Orthodox holidays that is the problem!
Retailers simply listing the May 2nd date for 2027 in addition to the March 28th Easter date in shops and retailers retaining seasonal stock such as Easter eggs in shops until after the Orthodox holiday makes all the difference for the thousands of Orthodox Christians residing in predominantly Western countries like the UK, the Republic of Ireland and so forth.
The same principle also applies to Orthodox Christmas, with shops continuing to sell Christmas puddings, turkeys and mince pies until after January 7th for Easter stock. Most people take their Christmas tree down on Twelfth Night (5th) or Epiphany (6th) January, but Orthodox Christmas is the very next day so 99.9% of Brits remove their decorations before Orthodox Christmas even arrives.
Simply retiming the UK’s Early May bank holiday to always coincide with Orthodox Easter Monday is also a move which should be considered and is perfectly possible - these moves are a massive way to acknowledge and help the Orthodox community who currently face difficulties in buying seasonal items for their celebrations due to the dominance of Western traditions. This lack of recognition is not a new problem, and there are already many existing change.org petitions that address this very issue such as Orthodox parents petitioning schools and education boards so pupils are not penalised for unauthorised school absences.
Parks and outdoor venues continuing to host Easter trails and egg hunts until after the Orthodox holiday is also something that needs to be looked into too.
Although the primary aim of this petition is to official force policymakers and churches to move Easter Sunday to March 22nd within the next 30 years, the secondary aim is to bring to light the complete lack of acknowledgement for Orthodox/Coptic holidays and observances in countries like the UK, the Republic of Ireland, the USA, Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia.
The tertiary aim of this petition is to raise awareness about how certain fixations affect neurodivergent individuals and the quaternary aim of the campaign is to share my very unique story about my March 22nd 2026 Easter celebration with the world.
As from my previous posts, even though the Western and Orthodox dates coincide on the same Sunday every so many years, they are two different dates on two different calendars with one significantly later in its date range than the other, much like how the notes G-sharp and A-flat are written differently on music scores despite landing on the same physical piano key and having the same pitch.
For example, April 20th 2025 was Easter Sunday for both the Western and Orthodox churches however this is only the sixth-latest date for the Western church – it is almost exactly in the middle of the Orthodox Easter date range and absolutely nowhere near its latest possible date despite both celebrations taking place at literally the same time, minute by minute!
Before Christmas 2025, I made my aunt and uncle a personalised 2026 calendar listing both the “wrong” official 2026 Ash Wednesday/Mothering Sunday/Easter dates as well as my personal observances and in the Busy Bee diaries, I mentioned the 23rd Century trivia explaining why I was celebrating Easter on March 22nd 2026.
Ahead of the late Queen Elizabeth’s 100th birthday - the reign of the late Queen’s itself contained some very interesting extreme Orthodox Easter dates, such as the most recent occurrence of the second-earliest date (April 5th NS) in 1953 (the year of the coronation), the third-latest date in 1956, the third-earliest date in 1980, the ultimate latest date in 1983, the fourth-earliest date in 1991, the ultimate earliest date in 2010 and the fourth-latest date in 2002 (the year of the late Queen’s Golden Jubilee) with the only absence being the second-latest date having most recently occurred in 1888 before the next occurrence in 2051.
As I manage multiple campaigns on the change.org platform I will not disclose my true identity but my real first name begins with the letter “R”, I was born in February 1993 and I am a member of the Larch social club for adults with autism without a learning disability at Kingston library which runs every Thursday from 17:30 to 19:45, run by Kingston Voluntary Action and its subsidiary Kingston Eco-Op.