Who chooses Easter

[Curious79]

We are having a debate at work and would all like to know, who chooses when Easter will be??  It is different every year, so who says that this year Easter is the 27th and not the 20th for example??

[willow74]

The date for Easter shifts every year within the Gregorian Calendar. The Gregorian Calendar is the standard international calendar for civil use.

The Council decided to keep Easter on a Sunday, the same Sunday throughout the world. To fix incontrovertibly the date for Easter, and to make it determinable indefinitely in advance, the Council constructed special tables to compute the date.

The usual statement, that Easter Day is the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs next after the vernal equinox, is not a precise statement of the actual ecclesiastical rules. The full moon involved is not the astronomical Full Moon but an ecclesiastical moon (determined from tables) that keeps, more or less, in step with the astronomical Moon.

The ecclesiastical rules are:

Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox;
this particular ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a tabular lunation (new moon); and
the vernal equinox is fixed as March 21.
resulting in that Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25.

[willow74]

So in short - The church !

[IndieSinger]

I do.

This year I have chosen to have it on 27th March.

Just wait until next year when I choose to put it the day after Boxing Day. A three-day chocolate fest is born!