For Christians, Sunday is the holiest day of the year — Easter. It is a day of celebration, commemorating the resurrection of the Son.

For millennia, this season also has been a time to celebrate the return of the sun, when our minds are on a kind of rebirth and living again in the light.

Easter brings us joy, yes. It also teaches us about sacrifice and love; and gives us a brightly colored reminder that we are supposed to love one another, too.

For many, it is a day of dressing up, perhaps attending church, having a meal with family and then giving in to modern traditions involving plastic or dyed Easter eggs and baskets filled with enough gifts to rival some families’ Christmas stockings.

It is preceded by parades, egg hunts and photo sessions with the Easter bunny (perhaps a nod by early Christian missionaries to the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre, who was associated with hares).

What we must ask ourselves next is how do we follow Easter? Who will we be on the day after?

Will we behave as though we have just celebrated the greatest model of compassion and forgiveness?

“Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again; for forgiveness has risen from the grave,” said St. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople, in his Easter homily of approximately 400 AD.

Celebrate, take care of one another, and behave as though you are, indeed, “Easter people” — not just this weekend, but always.

“For I remember it is Easter morn, and life and love and peace are all new born.”

• Alice Freeman Palmer,

Wellesley College president from 1881-1887

“‘Twas Easter-Sunday. The full-blossomed trees filled all the air with fragrance and with joy.”

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet