RIVER CITY JOURNAL: IF YOU WANT ACCURACY, TRY LOOKING IN A DICTIONARY OR ATLAS

But if you just want to come close, read on, and learn how the date of Easter is calculated, thanks to an advisory committee.

This is just a theory, mind you, and I haven't done a bunch of scientific research or conducted any polls.

But my theory is this: The folks who decided how to figure the date for Easter every year had either been to Missouri or heard about it. Of course, this was long before Missouri was a state and everything.

Every year the date for Easter jumps around on the calendar. It's what the church bigwigs call a movable feast. Christmas is always on Dec. 25. I don't know why. The Fourth of July is always on July 4. This is, in my opinion, one of the easiest holidays to remember.

We used to celebrate a whole bunch of other holidays -- Lincoln's Birthday, Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day and so on -- on fixed dates every year, until we discovered we could send a raft of federal employees home on just about every Monday of the year. The down side of this is the men and women of the Postal Service, who used to be federal employees, also take all those Mondays, and there is no mail delivery on those holidays. The up side is the bureaucrats who stay home all these Monday holidays have one less day each week to do whatever bureaucrats do. Even a lot of penny-pinching taxpayers see the wisdom of paying bureaucrats to stay at home and out of harm's way on most Mondays.

But back to Easter.

I'm pretty sure some ecclesiastical advisory committee was appointed way back in ancient times. There was probably a lot of fussing about when to celebrate Easter. This was important to early Christians, because it was a lot harder to find Easter-egg dye in those days. I don't think RIT started until a few years later.

Anyway, this committee got together one fine day, and several of the members said why not have Easter and Christmas and Pentecost and Groundhog Day all at the same time. They were thinking of expenses, of course, and thought throwing all those holidays into one blowout would be cost effective.

But others on the committee -- these were known as party animals, basically -- wanted to spread the special observances out as much as possible, maybe even think up a few more reasons to celebrate. I'm fairly certain it was this crowd that came up with the idea for celebrating the eves of everything. Why not start the night before? That was their thinking.

The committee was about ready to fix the date for Easter on April 15 every year. The party animals said they would go along if there was a whole week of special events, seeing as how Easter is the biggest holiday of all. Most of the others were ready to accept April 15, mainly because they were tired of committee meetings. Besides, they had no idea there would ever be an Internal Revenue Service.

But before the final vote, one member of the committee who had been pretty quiet all along finally spoke up.

"I think Easter ought to be whenever the dogwoods and redbuds are blooming in Missouri."

That caught a lot of the other committee members by surprise. For one thing, they had never heard of Missouri before, and they weren't too sure what dogwoods and redbuds were.

So this mild-mannered committee member -- let's call him Oscar the Lesser for convenience -- was called up to the front of the committee to explain his odd notion.

"If you'd ever been to Missouri when the trees are blooming in spring, you'd know what I'm talking about," said Oscar, smiling a smile that bordered on rapturous.

The rest of the committee wanted to know where this Missouri was and how to get there and were there good overnight accommodations and how was the traffic and could you get a decent cappucino or was it made from a mix out of a tin can. These were the basic questions you would get from almost any committee.

Oscar was at a loss to answer any of those questions. He wasn't exactly sure how he got to Missouri and back. Maybe he just dreamed it all up. All he knew was Easter was special, and so was Missouri during dogwood-redbud seasons. This was long before you could buy azaleas in gallon containers.

The only problem, Oscar said, was the dogwoods and redbuds don't bloom at the same time of the year every year. The committee harumphed quite a bit about unpredictable trees and quirky weather. Some of them knew how fast a storm could come up out of nowhere, sometimes when you were out fishing in a puny boat. Was that what Missouri was like? they wanted to know.

Oscar said you couldn't set your clocks by the dogwood and redbud blossoms (actually, they didn't have clocks in those days, but he was speaking Latin anyway, so it didn't make much difference). But, Oscar said, it would be worth changing the date of Easter every year just to have dogwoods and redbuds as outward and visible signs of God's splendor for the Easter celebration. Where else, Oscar said, could the change from dead, brown branches into vibrant whites and reds and pinks be so evident? Wouldn't that be a good symbol of the season?

Well, the discussion could have gone on and on. Remember, this was a committee -- an advisory one at that, so it really didn't have any power of its own. And it was dinnertime, and the party-animal contingent was itching for a fancy meal at one of the local eateries featuring lamb en brochette with asparagus and dill sauce, although I don't think they were meeting in France, which didn't exist at the time, so no one spoke French.

Anyway, the rest is history. I don't know if there is a feast day for Oscar the Lesser. It would take some more committee meetings to decide. Maybe it's better if there isn't. Just be grateful Easter coincides with the dogwoods and redbuds.

Some of the time.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.