I am not religious (though I say that with a non-negligible degree of guilt and a quick glance skywards in apology because what I actually am is a long-lapsed Catholic, and Catholics are like Marines – dead, former, but never ex-). But thank God for Easter. It is the perfect holiday for everyone.

If you are church-inclined then, obviously, it has the biggest story – and some of the most sweeping re-enactments possible – in the calendar. Dying for your followers’ sins and coming back three days later is tough to beat. Christmas is great and all, but it’s an awful lot of travelling (that only really makes sense if you understand about municipal bureaucracy) before you get to the baby part. Plus the increasing worry with which modern children greet Joseph’s possible reaction to Mary’s insistence that she is pregnant by God makes me genuinely more depressed every year.

But enough of this! For we are talking about Easter, lovely, shining Easter which wraps pagans in as much delight as anyone else. For parents – even and especially of modern children – it provides a school holiday of the perfect duration. It is not a stupid, pointless week like half-term, which just interrupts the domestic routine and flow as you have managed to establish it, and requires either mad expense or the burning of precious annual leave to cover childcare without returning anything in the way of relaxation, bonding or happy memories.

And it is not the half decade of summer holidays that were once useful for getting the harvest in, but which now only result in maths and French falling out of everyone’s heads after so long without school. And atrophying of muscles and social skills as the children have to be left to their screens, because no one has that much annual leave or money to spend on wholesome activities run by fully-vetted adults.

No, Easter is two, maybe three weeks. That’s a length you can work with and not become permanently financially or emotionally broken by. There’s time to take a short break away and in the UK because the weather is just about good enough. Grandparents – aka the relatives with a sanity-saving garden – are often happy to sign up as hosts, especially with wee ones because there isn’t a human heart in existence that doesn’t want to take a toddler round the place counting daffodils, looking for shiny eggs or exclaiming wildly over ducklings. There is simply nothing better, and that is a fact, speaking even as a general toddler-hater.

Because that’s the magic of the season too, isn’t it? Spring, proper spring, is magical. That’s what Easter, at its core, really has going for it. There’s a reason our (or your, or their, depending where you stand on the issue) saviour wasn’t resurrected in the middle of winter or the height of summer (stay in the cave! It’s so much cooler! Air conditioning’s not coming for years yet). The reawakening of nature every year never feels less than miraculous.

Tiny ruffles of leaves start appearing along branches that have looked like dead brown sticks for months, green shoots start pushing their way out of unprepossessing brown soil without anyone telling them to, buds start budding everywhere. Colours start appearing where – get this! – no colours were before… This blows my mind every single time. There is part of me at this point every year that is still looking to show Grandma every daffodil I find.

Which is to say that this magic, unlike most, does not wear off with age. In fact, if anything, it only becomes stronger. The older you get, the more battered and bruised by life you become, the more you learn to appreciate both the ineffable and the eternal. Spring provides both.

I suspect that most of us are exhausted at the moment, not just in the ordinary I-need-a-cup-of-tea-a-90-minute-nap-a-full-staff-and-six-figures-a-year-to-take-some-of-this-pressure-off kind of way, but at a more profound level. It’s been a long – well, let’s call it a decade, though for others it will be a bit longer and for others a bit shorter. We have woken every day for longer than seems possible to a cataract of terrible headlines, to an awareness of terrible suffering around the increasingly war-torn world led by madmen and shaped by the worst possible influences on them.

But griefs and miseries need people who can help alleviate them. And it’s not, of course, that a change in seasons can bring about any of the revolutionary changes of heads or hearts that is needed. But it works at vital, visceral level nevertheless. It works to restore faith, energy, optimism that the world was not, is not and will never be immutable. Spring shows us that life goes on, change comes and that breaking news is not the only rhythm we can heed.

Also, there is egg-shaped chocolate – the very tastiest form – out there. Eat some. Find some daffodils. Fortify yourself. Happy Easter.

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