Is Easter disappearing? Will it soon go the way of Whitsun, another once-great Christian holiday now ignored, and replaced by a secular bank holiday on a different date? It has been visibly shrinking in my lifetime.

Not all that long ago Good Friday was still a day of solemn stillness. Large numbers of people once went to Church for as long as three hours to mark the Crucifixion of Jesus.

Newspapers were not published – I remember this right up into the 1980s, because old Fleet Street (always thinking about tomorrow, not today) closed down for Maundy Thursday, the day before. As a result, that Thursday was the only weekday when I and other specialist reporters (never really off duty) could ignore the phone and head off into the bluebell-strewn woods with no fear of missing an important story. Now it’s just another shopping day.

It may be just me, but I get the impression that the old habit of chocolate Easter eggs may also be starting to fade. As for hot cross buns, there are now versions featuring tiramisu, rhubarb and custard, salted caramel and apple crumble. Some even have cheese in them. I suspect this is because modern tastebuds are bored by the real thing, and anyway, what is it about?

As I mentioned, Whitsun was once a major feast-day, a time for buying new clothes and getting married – celebrated in Philip Larkin’s great poem The Whitsun Weddings, in which the poet travels southwards by train across England on the Whitsun weekend, sees wedding parties laughing and shouting on every station platform and is – as a result – plunged into one of the most thoughtful and moving (and English) pieces of verse written in the last century.

There were a lot of Christenings on that day too. Big industrial towns had ‘Whit Weeks’ – when everyone was on holiday at once – at that time of spring, seven weeks after Easter. There were church parades and brass bands, and Morris dancing.

But in 1971, a supposedly Conservative government decided to tidy it up, and turn it into a ‘Late Spring Bank Holiday’. Now the Church of England drearily calls it ‘Pentecost’, which was in my childhood a technical term and foreign into the bargain. And it has faded from the calendar in the minds of most.

No wonder. It commemorated events that are incredibly hard to believe in – the descent of the Holy Ghost among men in the form of tongues of fire and of a rushing, mighty wind. Such festivals cannot easily be sentimentalised, as Christmas can. They’ve mostly gone in the last few centuries.

A window in St James the Great Church in Oxfordshire depicting Jesus carrying the cross

Among the forgotten is Lady Day, the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary that she would bear the Christ child, the subject of a thousand great paintings and once one of the four great Quarter Days of England on which rents were paid, debts settled or workers hired.

Ascension Day – still a great feast in Germany, though nowadays it is a sort of boozy National Blokes Day rather than a religious feast – has likewise vanished from our calendar.

Strangely, the most powerful festival in the modern year, after Christmas, is now Halloween, which is supernatural without being in any way religious.

Perhaps it is because I am a straggler of the last generation of English boys and girls to be brought up specifically as Protestant Christians, but I cannot find it in me to like Halloween.

I endured it in our friendly suburb when I lived in the wooded, cosy outskirts of Washington DC, because it would have been churlish not to. I liked our neighbours, and the children in our street ran freely in and out of every house, the joint concern of every adult. But something inside me was always asking if this was not in fact some sort of pagan festival, the enemy of the austere, orderly idea of the universe I had been brought up to embrace.

And then there are the war commemorations. It is of course a noble thing that each November we remember those who fell in war. And the ceremony at the Cenotaph is still explicitly Christian, or at least part of it is. But it is slightly puzzling that the ceremonies grow greater and more solemn, as the events they mark fall further into the past.

There is a hunger in most of us to be more serious, and to respect the past and the sacrifices of our forebears, and it needs to be satisfied. But the Christian religion is scarcely taught to the young as a living faith, much more as a peculiar tribal habit followed by some odd people in the past and some old people nowadays.

So Easter must seem especially cold and frightening, and incomprehensible to them.

I get the impression that the old habit of chocolate Easter eggs may also be starting to fade, writes Peter Hitchens

There is no fun here, just the dirty betrayal of a good man by those he thought were his friends, a screeching mob full of planted influencers egging it on, a cowardly politician giving in to them, a show trial with false witnesses, a wrongful execution of extreme cruelty, followed by nights of despair.

And then at the end of it, the most difficult and dangerous belief in all human thought, literature and philosophy – a man actually rising from the dead, still scarred and bleeding from the torture and the butchery, but also still himself and much more than that.

Maybe Easter will revive and grow again once it has ceased to be officially sanctioned and marked with public holidays. Perhaps those of us who still seek to be Christian should welcome the retreat of the Church – away from power and status and into an embattled, unpopular and often despised corner, where it must fight for its beliefs against the scorn that its founder so often faced, and overcame.

Last night, I was part of a small minority as I slipped into a silent church to eat the Lord’s Supper for Maundy Thursday, the darkest, bitterest night of the Christian year. We stepped outside the modern world and into a chilly evening on a Judaean hilltop, two thousand years ago.

As the service re-enacted the Last Supper, and Jesus’s final hours of freedom in the Garden of Gethsemane, all decorations, candles and ornaments were stripped from the building, and the lights extinguished one by one until we were all left in the darkness and silence of a world entirely without hope. We filed out one by one without any of the usual conversations or greetings.

Today, I shall attend a heartbreakingly beautiful choral version of St John’s account of Jesus’s death, and sing, or in my case croak, the mysterious, bloodstained hymn When I Survey The Wondrous Cross before going out into streets, which are crammed with shoppers who are quite oblivious to the majesty of the great day.

You can keep the rest of it – buns, eggs, bunnies, bonnets and legs of lamb, the lot. A good dose of gloom is salve to the English soul. But I can easily see why not many others want to join me.