We did it!

We have reached the all-important milestone of 366 signatures, which means that theoretically we have enough signatures to cover every birthday in a leap year, in actual fact because it is highly unlikely that everyone has a completely different birthday we would need several thousand signatures to hit every birthday in practice but despite the high financial cost, reaching this level of support has been hugely monumental and has allowed my story about celebrating Easter on March 22nd 2026 (a date no church recognised whatsoever, putting me in a tiny minority) to be heard and has helped me through a difficult spring.

My next goal is 379 signatures to match the signature count of the 2024 petition titled “Observance and Formal Recognition of Orthodox Christian holidays”, then 400 after that.

Our campaign’s journey:

• §  May 25th 2025 – Discovered the infamous Reddit post that triggered my date obsession

• §  August to October 2025 – Discovered Orthodox Easter and simultaneously started Christmas shopping for “Busy Bee” diaries which I then painstakingly converted into homemade 2026 diaries with Easter on March 22nd.

• §  December 25th 2025 – Received my Alice in Wonderland (2010) bedsheets as a surprise and celebrated the first Thursday Christmas in 11 years with a jazzy light show bath in the dark with Sanctuary Spa and Satsuma bubblebath (a very Christmassy smell)

• §  February 22nd – Celebrated my 33rd birthday exempt from my Lenten fast

• §  February 27th – Launched the campaign on my phone during a car ride to RHS Wisley Gardens, surpassed 5 signatures later that same day officially making the campaign visible

• §  March 22nd – Celebrated ‘my’ Easter Sunday with roughly 92 signatures

• §  March 25th – Hit our first major milestone of 100 signatures

• §  April 1st – Hit 125 signatures

• §  April 5th – The dreaded date! Staged an “un-Easter” Alice in Wonderland protest with my family, refused to accept it was Easter and watched the Alice in Wonderland apron YouTube video by Miranda Milner to cope with the distressing hated day with roughly 140 signatures

• §  April 7th – Hit 150 signatures

• §  April 13th – Hit 200 signatures on Orthodox Easter Monday

• §  April 18th – Hit 225 signatures and watched Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief in celebration

• §  April 25th – Surpassed 250 signatures on the latest possible date for Western Easter

• §  May 1st – Had a big party celebrating the end of “Awful April” and subsequently hit 260 signatures

• §  May 9th – Surpassed 300 signatures on the latest possible date for Orthodox Easter Monday

• §  May 22nd – Reached 333 (a third of a thousand) signatures

• §  May 25th – Surpassed 345 signatures on “Reddit Day”

• §  May 26th – Surpassed 350 signatures

• §  May 28th - Hit the all important  366 signatures milestone (theoretically one for every birthday) ahead of schedule

Although I have seen new petitions on change.org reach this number of signatures within  days of their launch, many of them do not have regular updates and I believe that the number of updates is JUST AS IMPORTANT than the total number of signatures because it shows the campaigner really engaging with their supporters.

I ran a petition that eventually won with just over 1,500 supporters shortly before this one went live and that one in total had over 80 updates and I believe that I made a difference by regularly updating my supporters whenever something relevant to that petition took place.

After 2035, there will be a quick succession of two upcoming disaster years, 2046 and 2051- in 2046, Orthodox Easter Monday will fall the day before the UK’s fixed early May bank holiday and in 2051, Orthodox Easter Monday will fall the week after the bank holiday.

Due to the way the calendar works, we have only had two years this catastrophic for UK Orthodox Christians since 1980, those two years being 1983 and 2008 (two years before their earliest possible Easter date) however with the next 30 years we have three (2035, 2046 and 2051), therefore 2035 is the ABSOLUTE DEADLINE to fully authorise an "Orthodox Easter Monday" bank holiday in the UK making the existing early May bank holiday moveable.

Although when I first came across Orthodox Easter, I was looking at the life of an Orthodox Christian's life through rose-tinted glasses (because they saw their earliest-possible date in 2010), I quickly realised that their lives were anything but pleasant when I realised just how badly marginalized/marginalised  they are in Western countries (used both the UK and US spellings as this is a global campaign) with a complete lack of bank holidays, festive Easter events ceasing and retailers clearing out all Easter treats in so-called "disaster years". 

Trivia unrelated to Easter:

Completely unrelated to the petition, I have an analogy to describe growing up; primary school is civil twilight, secondary school is nautical twilight and college/university immediately after secondary school is astronomical twilight. Therefore, true darkness (adulthood) only truly begins after graduation (apart from those changing careers, like I did after COVID) and I view a person's early 20s as people being in the "twilight of their childhood", where only stars (qualifications) shine after graduation.

As per my previous update, I did not learn that twilight last all night for much of the UK during summer until 2013 (the year of the fourth-latest possible Easter date), and was SHOCKED AND SURPRISED just how far south this phenomenon extends having never noticed it before.

The photo above is a screenshot from September 2011 of the varying flight paths between London and Aberdeen.

Will update you again when we pass the next milestone of 379 signatures!