On Palm Sunday in Palermo, you can’t ignore it. Walk through the piazzas or step into a bakery, and there they are: delicate braids of palm fronds displayed in windows, carried by children in scout uniforms, clutched by grandparents.
The churches are full. The streets feel alive with a sense of occasion, a quiet reverence mingled with joy. Whatever your beliefs – and I no longer believe – you feel something meaningful happening.
Back home in the UK, Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week barely register. Easter, for the most part, begins and ends with ever more expensive hot-cross buns, chocolate bunnies and pastel-wrapped eggs, and two extra days off. If we mention the religious calendar at all, it’s usually by accident, as a reminder to buy those buns before the supermarket replaces them with barbecue deals.
None of this is to deny the progress we’ve made. Britain has, admirably, sought to become a more inclusive, diverse society. We’re careful not to exclude those of other faiths – or of no faith at all – from our public celebrations. Indeed, this year one primary school in Hampshire has cut its Easter bonnet parade and won’t attend an Easter service at a local church as part of its aim to, in the words of its headteacher in a letter to parents, “create a more inclusive atmosphere that honours and respects the beliefs of all our children and their families”.
That instinct comes from a good place. But in our eagerness not to offend, we may have quietly, unintentionally, erased a piece of cultural memory that once gave cohesion and rhythm to our shared life.
square STEFANO HATFIELD
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Read MorePalm Sunday – which commemorates when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, welcomed by crowds waving palm branches – isn’t just a religious warm-up act before Good Friday. It’s a story about humility, hope, and the tension between popularity and truth. Even for the non-religious, it is rich in symbolism. It reminds us how quickly we can celebrate a person one day, and condemn them the next. That has obvious modern relevance.
Yet Sicilians haven’t clung to Palm Sunday because they’re all devout churchgoers. They keep it alive because it’s part of their cultural fabric. Tradition, in their hands, hasn’t turned to dust; it’s living, evolving, and shared. You don’t have to be Christian to admire that.
In the UK, however, there’s a growing tendency to treat Christian festivals with a sort of polite awkwardness – not quite embarrassment, but certainly reluctance. Christmas just about survives, but it’s become more about the John Lewis advert than the manger and star. And Easter? Reduced, mostly, to a sugar rush.
There is, I think, a space to reclaim something here – not by excluding anyone, but by including our own heritage in the conversation. A secular society should still be able to recognise and celebrate the stories that shaped it.
You don’t have to believe in the resurrection to value the messages of sacrifice, forgiveness, and new beginnings. You don’t need to attend church to acknowledge that these dates once marked emotional landmarks in the year: moments to pause, to gather, to reflect.
We rightly make space for Diwali, Eid, Passover and Lunar New Year among other celebrations, not to replace anything, but to enrich our collective life. Why, then, should we not allow Easter – and Palm Sunday with it – to carry more than just foil-wrapped sweetness?
There’s still time, this Holy Week, to let something deeper in. And maybe even to pick up a palm frond – not out of piety, but out of curiosity, respect, and a desire to remember who we are.
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