No Google Doodle For Easter: Google Snubs Easter For 17th Year In A Row

The year 2017 marks the 17th year in a row the Google company has snubbed the Easter holiday. Once again, Google has failed to produce one of their famed “Google Doodles” to be featured on the Google main page to honor the Easter holiday.

Google Doodles replace the typical graphic that Google features on their page displaying their company’s name with a clever graphic honoring a holiday or special event. Some are just a cute or interesting rendering that changes the letters to be in some way relevant to the special day in question, but some are quite ambitious and feature animations or even games for the user to participate in.

Google has an archive of the Doodles for users to observe and interact with them. Some, like the 2016 Doodle Fruit Games, were interactive and honored the Olympics in Rio. Others, like the recent April 8 Doodle in honor of Mary Pickford’s birthday, are an artistic re-creation of the Google logo that doubles as a featured image of an important holiday, birthday, or special event.

The Doodles serve the important purpose of letting everyone who uses the search engine know of an important event or holiday, and also symbolize cultural solidarity by unifying all Google users under a common Doodle. People can click on the Doodle and learn more about the holiday or person featured in the graphic.

But now, for the 17th year in a row, Google has snubbed the Easter holiday by failing to feature even a simple graphic to acknowledge the holiday. Google featured an Easter Doodle only once, in 2000, two years after the company started in 1998.

Since then, when it comes to Easter, Google has been consistently and conspicuously silent.

Google is not consistent when it comes to behaving in an areligious manner, either. Their distinctions do not seem to be based on whether the holiday is religious or not. In other words, Easter is not omitted as a Google Doodle because of its origins as a religious holiday — Google is not consistent because it features other important holidays from non-Christian religions as Google Doodles.

For example, Google celebrates the Jewish festival of Tu B’av every year. Google also celebrates the Hindu festival, Holi. And Google has an entire subpage dedicated to the Islamic festival of Ramadan.

Easter is resoundingly and consistently snubbed.

Easter is an important Christian holiday, although millions of people observe it in a non-religious manner. Christians believe that Easter celebrates the day that Christ rose from the dead after his Crucifixion.

Easter is celebrated by at least a billion people all over the world. Therefore, the lack of an Easter Doodle doesn’t go unnoticed.

A few years ago, Google published an explanation for why they routinely snub Easter.

“Thank you everyone for your feedback. We enjoy celebrating holidays at Google but, as you may imagine, it can be difficult for us to choose which events to highlight on our site each year.”

Critics point out that this isn’t much of an explanation. Tom Blumer of Newsbusters, a site that aims to expose and combat liberal media bias, translated Google’s explanation as follows.

“You bunch of whiners, we put up an Easter doodle 15 years ago (now 16). What are you complaining about?”

He went on to say that Google routinely snubbing Easter seems intentional, since it is such a large and culturally important holiday for Christians everywhere.

“Yes, this is a ‘cultural blind spot’ that looks more and more with each passing year like a deliberate in-your-face omission.”

Instapundit’s Ed Driscoll said that you only have to notice that there’s no Easter Doodle to understand why Google omits it compared to other holidays.

Why do you think Google refuses to acknowledge Easter?

[Featured Image by Mario Tama/Getty Images]