Easter Sunday celebrations for 2009 fall on April 12 in the western calendar (Catholic and Protestant Churches). The Eastern Orthodox Church has set the date for Easter 2009 to be 19th April.
Easter is a "floating" holiday whose main constant is that it falls 40 days after Ash Wednesday, which is the day after "Fat Tuesday" or in French, "Mardi Gras." The 40 days between Mardi Gras & Easter is called Lent - a period of fasting, sacrifice and prayer in symbolic remembrance of the Christ's sacrifice.
The float has been occurring since the Council of Nicaea in the year 325AD, when Roman Emperor Constantine I ordered the Christian leaders to set doctrine and dates of principal Christian events.
Easter (literally, to the east) is not only the Christian Resurrection, but that of older paganism as well, calling the re-birth of the Earth and spring from the depths and deaths of winter and the solstice. Not coincidentally, Easter's "float" moves around the vernal equinox.
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