Sweet chocolates, sunshine, tulips voluptuous as showgirls. You takes your choice of Easter now, and you pays your money too. For some people, it's the most resonant season of the Christian calendar, for others a chance to take time out from all the soul-scorching demands of the 24-hour working day. Secular or scapular, you can't miss its symbolic power, especially not this year.
"Easter means hope," says the Rev John Paterson, Dean of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. "It's about how sorrow changes to joy, and how people discover a conviction they need about themselves and each other."
Making Easter a gothic parable of death and blood sacrifice gave elements of the 1916 Rising their memorability.
But if the peace process succeeds in moving the culture closer to the profounder spiritual symbolism of resurrection, Easter's original motifs could for once hold true across secular and religious contexts.
"Whether or not we practise Easter as a sacred time, we still need that sense of what Mircea Eliade calls `sacred space'," says Dr Angela Bourke, Irish scholar and culture commentator.
Unlike Christmas, Easter was a new invention, not a make-over from pagan times. For about seven centuries, the Celtic Church celebrated it at a different date from other European countries. As Rome's authority grew, the Celtic Church eventually fell into line, and Easter came to be celebrated, as now, on the Sunday following the first full moon after the 21st of March. It was a key date in the human almanac.
"In the traditional Christian calendar, life was one of fairly unremitting agricultural toil, so Easter was a way of marking off this time as different from others - it's an archetypal holy day," explains Dr Bourke.
What that date promised was that the time coming would be in some way different from what had gone before. It might be simply a question of longer days, better weather, some respite from the hard slog of winter.
"Spring comes incrementally," she explains. "An old story tells how St Brigid promised every second day would be fine after her day, and then how St Patrick went one better by promising every day would be fine after his day."
At Easter time, the sun was said to "dance a jig on the rim of the world for joy", according to folklore that Dr Bourke has studied. That image of sunshine associates with secular and spiritual celebrations of Easter across Europe, even if the agricultural world it first described is marginalised.
Traditional Christian practices made Easter a time of forgiveness and renewal, following the restrictions of Lent. Then, you could eat meat only once a day, along with two "collations" or light snacks, and no supper. So eggs were cooked every which way - hence the final reward of a chocolate one.
You were allowed two plain biscuits with a cup of tea, but it wasn't always sufficient. Entrepreneurs found ways around the restrictions. A bakery in Cork became famous for inventing the "Connie Dodger", a huge biscuit big enough to fill the hungriest stomach, and named after the strict bishop there, Dr Cornelius Lucey.
Una Mahony grew up in Dublin's northside in the 1940s, close to Archbishop's House where Dr John McQuaid worked. The local children were especially careful to keep their Lenten fast, and many endured the long walk between the "Seven Churches" on Holy Thursday, going from Corpus Christi on Griffith Avenue to the chapel at the Dominican Convent on Eccles Street.
"We had our dinner in the middle of the day then, just like Coronation Street," she recalls. "There was a great sense of anticipation as Easter Sunday approached. That morning, you finally got to eat all the sweets you had hidden throughout Lent - they were always squashed, because you had to hide them somewhere your sisters and brothers wouldn't find them."
Things have changed. In Una Mahony's childhood, you counted yourself lucky to get one egg from Fuller's, or from Noblett's in Dublin's O'Connell Street. Now, children compete with each other to see who got the most eggs, and the marketing of Easter as a great secular feast can make celebrating expensive.
Easter is a marketing man's dream. The Easter bunny threatens to outdo Jesus Christ as the new brand image of Easter.
If religious feasts were introduced to celebrate spiritual insights, the secular truths of marketing and commerce are making more than Easter their own. Christmas is not complete without the usual expressions of anxiety about consumerism; events like Mother's Day and Father's Day seem to be supplanting older festivals in the post-clerical calendar.
But if Dr Bourke is correct, the intense human need to make sense out of life suggests that symbolising and symbol-making will persist, whatever religious practices are followed. Sacred spaces may or may not be holy spaces, in a traditional sense, but their cultural function is as powerful as ever.
The Christian churches are now aligning themselves as one of the key sectors which may do battle with consumerism in the future. Some Christian leaders are realistic about current trends.
"That's the world we're living in, and it's no more pagan than in the time of Christ," says Bishop Brendan Comiskey. "Lamenting commercialism puts the blame onto others - there will always be both greed and generosity, depression and elation. We have to stop condemning, and each explore the deeper meaning of our human condition, our human hell."
Christmas is a more popular feast than Easter, he argues, because we are more comfortable with images of childhood than with those of death and resurrection. What he calls "the flight from silence" which marks the sheer busyness of contemporary life is, he speculates, "an attempt to flee from our own demons".
"The hell of the human condition is all those frightening things we're not facing," he continues. "There's no easy way of accessing our own depths, but everywhere there's Hell, there's resurrection. That's the core message of the Catholic Church."
Dean Paterson draws his analogy from the cinema. "Take two current films - Titanic and The Full Monty: people talk about the wonders of Titanic, but it is about disaster, whereas The Full Monty, whatever you might think about it, is about a few forlorn people wanting something to happen, and making it so - it's about hope."
The Dean is from Downpatrick, and is particularly struck by the symmetry between the Easter liturgy and the peace process. "We need that special hope in Ireland now - Easter says that things can be different and that we can change. It is a marvellous opportunity for joy."