The same date, two different celebrations.
By: Julia G. Avila, Visual Storyteller, MDM
This was my second Easter Sunday in Toronto, and as I was getting ready to have lunch with some Colombian friends, I found myself wandering mentally through the spring aisles — those tentative seasonal displays with easter motives that have been quietly pushing their way into the city's discount stores since the Christmas decorations came down. I thought about the excitement on children's faces at the prospect of a long weekend, and before I knew it, I had drifted somewhere else entirely: into the memories of Holy Week, which might look like the same celebration from a distance, but isn't. I've come to understand that a people's traditional celebrations are the moments when everything that has shaped their culture becomes visible — land, Indigenous nations, migrations, and religions, all crossing paths and giving rise to expressions as vivid as the ones unfolding around the world at the start of April. Easter and Holy Week share the same root: both emerge from the Christian liturgical calendar, from the final chapter of Christ's life. And both mark a threshold — a turning point whose weight isn't measured in days, but in everything that leads up to it For Spanish-speaking countries, that root arrived through a Roman Catholic lens, and that shapes everything: the gravitational centre of the week is not Sunday morning, but Good Friday — with its processions, its re-enactments of sacrifice, its hymns, and its shared mourning.
The end of a long journey
In the Spanish-speaking world, Holy Week doesn't arrive on its own. It is the culmination of a long ritual path: Christmas, carnival, Ash Wednesday, Lent — forty days during which the devout prepare and Friday meat gives way to fish — and finally, Holy Week itself. By the time Resurrection Sunday arrives, an entire ritual cycle has been completed. Sunday, then, is the closing page of that chapter, and also the last breath of the quiet that the week of contemplation offers to those who may not practise the faith but still feel its hush. In a country shaped by seasons like Canada is, the shift is written in the land and in the body. It has been months of low light and cold, of turning inward — and even if modern life allows us to move through winter more comfortably, it's not the same. There is a collective restlessness, a shared hunger to reclaim the outdoors. Easter becomes a ceremonial opening to that sun-filled life, and the greening of the landscape makes the sense of renewal feel almost instinctive.
Looking back
Growing up in Bogotá, every Friday from Ash Wednesday onward, the only animal protein on the table was fish — especially dried salted fish, the kind that rarely appeared on the shopping list at any other time of year. The entire week was a school holiday, and Thursday and Friday were public holidays for everyone, churchgoer or not. Every television channel aired exclusively Biblical films. Friday itself was a day of near-silence: radio stations broadcast only classical music, the Sermon of the Seven Last Words, the Stations of the Cross, the Mass from Monserrate, and, of course, the live broadcast from the Vatican. For those less fervent in their faith, the week was simply a welcome rest, and those who could afford it would head to warmer climates — escaping Bogotá's highland chill for the coast or the lowlands — and that, too, became part of the tradition. I grew up assuming the whole world moved this way. Travel, and time, taught me otherwise: that land, community, and cosmology mix to produce expressions that are entirely their own — unrepeatable, and quietly extraordinary in their everyday life.
The rabbit, the drum, and the procession
The Easter egg hunt practised in so many Canadian homes traces back to Germanic spring traditions linked to fertility and the renewal of the natural world. And there is something else I discovered while researching this piece: Indigenous nations, who were already celebrating the end of winter at the spring equinox long before European contact, have in some cases woven their own observances alongside Easter — community feasts, spring goose hunts, and ancestral dances held alongside Christian ceremonies, for those who also practise that faith. The ancient nations that persist in colonized territories do not let their traditions die. They may carry them quietly beneath the forms imposed from outside, reshaping and reclaiming them — but the thread remains unbroken. This is not unfamiliar in Latin America either. Indigenous nations, alongside the vast African diasporas brought against their will, have woven their beliefs and customs into something altogether new — producing celebrations of singular, startling beauty. The Viacrucis of Iztapalapa in Mexico City has over 150 years of history. The renowned processions of Popayán, Colombia, were declared an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The ceremonies of Guatemala, where colonial churches hold Mayan art and rituals of memory and forgiveness side by side.
I name these because they are widely known — but they are far from the only ones. Those reading these lines will have their own, just as moving, just as deeply rooted.
As I sit here turning my tea bag slowly in a steaming mug, watching through the window the unpredictable moods of these first spring days — each unexpected ray of sunshine immediately drawn out by neighbours tending their gardens, gathering in parks, talking on stoops — I find myself wondering what new traditions I'll encounter in a country where so many of us have arrived carrying our own. So: if you've made it to these last lines, is there one you'd like to share?
