Why Is Easter Called Easter? And What's with the Bunny?

Here's something that might genuinely surprise you: nobody is completely sure why we call it Easter.

The most widely accepted explanation comes from a monk named Bede, writing about 1,300 years ago. He traced the word back to Eostre — a Germanic goddess of spring and the dawn. Long before Christianity spread through Europe, people held spring festivals in her honor. When those early Christian communities arrived with their celebration of Jesus rising from the dead — which happened to fall in the same season — the old spring festival name stuck around.

Most other languages never made this leap. Spanish says Pascua. French says Pâques. Both trace back to the Hebrew Pesach, or Passover. English just kept the old goddess name. History is wonderfully strange like that.

So What About the Bunny?

Rabbits and hares were already tied to spring long before the Easter Bunny showed up in anyone's basket. They appear everywhere as the season turns, and they are famously, enthusiastically reproductive — so cultures across time connected them to new life, fertility, and the return of warmth.

The specific Easter Bunny character traces back to German folklore in the 1600s. German children believed in a magical hare called the Oschter Haws — a spring version of Santa Claus, essentially, who judged whether kids had been good and left colored eggs in nests they made from their hats and bonnets.

German immigrants brought this tradition to America in the 1700s. The hare became a bunny. The hat-nests became baskets. And here we are.

And the Eggs?

Eggs as symbols of new life predate Christianity by thousands of years. Cultures across the world looked at an egg — this closed, quiet thing that could crack open and produce life — and understood it as a symbol of beginnings.

Early Christians adopted the egg to represent the resurrection: the sealed tomb cracking open, new life emerging from inside.

There's also a wonderfully practical origin story here. During Lent — the 40 days of fasting and reflection before Easter — eggs were forbidden. So by the time Easter arrived, people had a serious surplus. They hard-boiled them to preserve them, then decorated them to mark the celebration. In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, eggs were often dyed red, symbolizing the blood of Christ.

A religious rule about fasting accidentally gave us one of the most recognizable holiday traditions. That's the kind of historical detail I find myself thinking about.