It creeps up on you, doesn’t it?

One year, possibly (probably) pre-children, you vow never to get sucked into the consumerism, performance and stress of over-celebrating every holiday. “I’ll keep it simple,” you swear, somewhere around your child’s first set of family-matching Christmas pyjamas.

“We won’t go overboard,” you mutter to yourself as you buy Halloween cookies for your six-year-old’s “boo bucket” and arrange a dozen pumpkins on your porch. “Never again,” you promise, as you vacuum up 3,000 foil shamrocks and, in the background, your children play with their St. Patrick’s Day yo-yos.

Then, before you know it, it’s time to plug in your inflatable Easter lawn display, stuff plastic eggs with Sephora lip glosses, prepare “bunny buckets” and wonder when Easter started to look more like a pastel-coloured Christmas morning.

Spending on holidays is up

If it seems like every year Easter, and in fact every holiday, gets a little more intense, we’re here to tell you that you’re correct.

Various reports, trends and studies suggest people are spending more money on Easter and other holidays, investing more time in their children, and in general, parents are putting more pressure on themselves to give their kids picture-perfect childhoods.

On the one hand, going all-in on holidays serves as a helpful distraction during increasingly stressful times, explains Lisa Strohschein, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta and editor-in-chief of Canadian Studies in Population.

“In some sense, maybe it is parents trying to protect their kids, to shield them from the fact that things are just not right in the world,” Strohschein told CBC News.

But on the other, these expectations of a perfect Easter egg hunt and perfect family photo at the dinner table set everybody up for failure, she said. It buys into the idea that if you don’t do these things, you haven’t done the holiday right.

“There’s so much emotional investment in making things look perfect in a world where perfection is not a reality,” Strohschein said.

“It’s such a superficial existence to pretend that’s what reality is. It deceives us, I think, from finding true joy.”

A Pinterest-worthy Easter

One need only look at social media for evidence of how we’ve gone down the Easter rabbit hole. There are hundreds of thousands of TikTok videos about Easter baskets, for instance, each more abundant, or at least time-consuming, than the last.

“I definitely think that this is Pinterest worthy,” the influencer known as Make it with Micah says in a new video where she builds an aesthetic Easter basket for her daughter filled with, by our calculations, at least $700 worth of goodies.

The video has more than 280,000 views. And it’s far from an outlier.

On Instagram, parents post stylized photos of rows of pastel Igloo coolers filled with picnic supplies and treats, or torso-sized clear eggs stuffed with Abercrombie & Fitch clothing and satin pillowcases.

Even the practical influencers who market “realistic hauls” are tossing in Barbie Hot Wheels monster trucks and describing the “coins and dollar bills” they plan to stuff inside plastic Easter eggs.

Meanwhile, on Reddit, parents debate how much money to spend on each kid ($50? $100?) or whether a single e-scooter is enough.

‘A good time for a big gift’

But not everyone is doing it because they feel pressured to follow social media trends or to boost their own views and likes.

Melissa Toolsie, 29, of Smith Falls, Ont., says Easter is her favourite holiday, and she loves “going big” for her six-year-old daughter. She doesn’t feel any pressure to give her daughter a perfect holiday, Toolsie said. She just loves the season.

“I think Easter, being at the start of springtime, is such a good time for a big gift,” Toolsie told CBC News.

“It’s the perfect opportunity to get kids something to encourage active, outdoor play,” she said.

Last year, she gave her daughter a bike. The year before, it was a trampoline. And this year? A pink all-terrain vehicle.

WATCH | Will dropping cocoa prices make Easter chocolate any cheaper?

Easter baskets as status symbols

You may be wondering: how did Easter go from a Christian holiday marking the resurrection of Jesus Christ to influencers showing off their $700 bunny buckets?

That’s… not a straightforward answer. But the commercialization of the religious holiday started taking off around the 1870s, according to National Geographic, as American store windows started to reflect “the increasingly ostentatious decor on American altars.”

Meanwhile, German and French confectioners developed solid chocolate Easter eggs in the early 19th century, according to the Guinness Word Records, and the U.K. created the first hollow one in 1873, followed by Cadbury two years later.

These eggs were seen as luxury items, explained Serin Quinn from the department of history at the University of Warwick in a 2023 article on The Conversation. Supermarkets only started offering them at a cheaper price in the 1960s and 1970s, she wrote.

For retailers, Easter and other “springtime occasions” have become a major marketing opportunity. According to market research company Circana, in the week before Easter last year, summer and seasonal toys in the U.S. experienced a $50 million US week-over-week dollar lift, and sales of plush toys went up $45 million.

As for baskets, a blogger for Scientific American writes that while they have historical and symbolic meaning, in more recent years, they’ve become about status.

Stocking them with expensive gifts may stem from parents’ desire in recent years to move away from candy, anthropologist Krystal D’Costa speculated in the 2017 article.

“They demonstrate personal wealth in that being able to provide a basket, and fill it with non-traditional Easter items, implies that you are doing well financially,” she writes.

Fast-forward a decade, and new data from the U.S. National Retail Federation predicts that Easter spending is expected to reach a record $24.9 billion US in 2026, a 73 per cent increase from 2007. Gifts were among the top planned purchases, just behind food and candy.

In the same timeline, the proportion of Americans surveyed who said they actually celebrate Easter hasn’t changed much.

‘Another BS social media trend’

Easter has always been commercialized, said Strohschein, the sociology professor. But what’s new, she says, is how these celebrations have become intimately wrapped in the idea of the “right” way to be a family.

“We just get presented with all these images of how others are doing the holiday, and they’re all the same,” Strohschein said.

“Then there’s that pressure, that ‘That’s what it looks like, and I have to do my part, too.'”

At the same time, almost as common as the Easter abundance posts are the opposite posts from bewildered, sometimes angry parents refusing to participate. On Reddit, people sometimes grudgingly refer to Easter as “second Christmas” and “spring Christmas” and fight with other parents about spending too much.

“Since when are we getting gifts for Easter?!” commented someone in a parenting sub-reddit on a post last month, in which another parent asked if a bike is too over the top.

“The more of this out-of-control hyper-consumption I witness, the more I want to launch my phone out of the window and go live in the woods,” said intentional-living influencer Aimee Rebecca in a YouTube video last week.

“How I create the perfect Easter basket for my kids… I don’t, because it’s another BS social media trend that puts unnecessary pressure on parents,” parenting influencer Victoria Emes writes alongside an Instagram video of her flipping the bird in bunny ears.

“An Easter egg is enough.”