Easter is the best holiday, hands down, no debate. In October, when the first Christmas decorations start to appear, it triggers deep dread in all right-thinking people. I’m in the US, where Thanksgiving doesn’t land for me, ditto the Fourth of July. There’s no day off for Halloween, but in any case that’s an occasion just for the kids. Like everything else, Easter has become more commercial – the shops are full of wicker baskets stuffed with shredded paper that once spilled, will never fully be expunged from your home. But relative to other holidays, it feels like the one grownup break in the year. Truly, who can be miserable about the advent of spring? For non-believers raised in a roughly Christian tradition, part of the joy of Easter has to do with it being uncoupled from religion without an attendant secular mythology springing up in its place. “The Easter bunny isn’t real,” said one of my children this week, and after giving it a moment’s thought, I realised she was right. No one sells the Easter bunny as real to their kids, even as we shill desperately for Santa and the Tooth Fairy. I’m not sure why this is; on paper, a giant bunny isn’t any more ludicrous than a fat man flying on a sleigh. But no one cares enough about Easter to put in the ground work and the resulting low pressure of the event is sublime. In fact, it’s barely an event at all. There are no Easter rules, no expense or outlay, and only the most minimal forethought and planning required. Swing by the shops for some Cadbury Mini Eggs and a large chicken and you’re set for the weekend. You can see family if you want, but don’t have to. There’s no Easter equivalent of Friendsgiving, or Friendsmas, at least not one that requires its own word. Being alone at Easter isn’t a thing. You can spend the entire long weekend watching all five seasons of Breaking Bad and eating out of your kettle without fighting off messaging that you’re doing it wrong. Perhaps things feel particularly jolly this year because, unusually, Ramadan, Passover and Easter all align. Like an eclipse, this only happens once every few decades and puts millions of us on the same page. In the US, the public schools shut for a week, so it’s not the two-week juggernaut of the Easter holiday in England. But we get Friday off, the sun has finally come out, and the daffodils at the roadside are blooming. It can be hard to enjoy summer in the knowledge that summer is passing. But at Easter, everything good is to come. And with low expectations, it’s hard for things to derail too disastrously, or for the Easter weekend to be held up against too-vivid memories. As a child, my entire Easter drama consisted of making the chocolate bunny last, starting at the ears and nibbling half an inch a day so that the greying carcass of its feet were still in the fridge in late May. In my 20s, my presiding memory of Easter is of the bus replacement service; track work that always seemed to be scheduled for that weekend I went home. It didn’t matter. There was no hurry. No one’s in a hurry at Easter. You have days and days to get there; it’s not like the mad Christmas Eve dash. If you faff about on Good Friday and miss your train, you still have the whole of Saturday to get home, and if you miss Easter Sunday, there’s still Easter Monday. I’m not saying there aren’t bad memories of Easter in among the good: Harry Secombe singing the Old Rugged Cross on ITV; simnel cake; off-brand chocolate that turned to watery paste in your mouth. In 2002, the Queen Mother died on Easter weekend and I trudged back to London to work. This year, I know a lot of hacks glancing very nervously in the direction of the Queen. It’s only Easter; if anything happens you can’t really say no. But the blossom is out in New York, we’re heading into a chunky break with no commitments, and the summer is yet to come. It has taken a long time to get here. Recognising the superiority of this weekend is something that only comes with maturity, like understanding dark is better than milk chocolate, and cheese is better than any chocolate. Happy Easter. Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York