The true meaning of Easter, by Stephen Collins (who writes his own amazing #AltText)

"PAGAN GODDESS: Aisle four is full of products, with no hint of the true meaning of the festival!

BECKY: You mean … Jesus …?

PAGAN GODDESS: I mean shagging, Vicky."

@Natasha_Jay For what it's worth, I very recently saw that this might not actually be true. I thought it was for decades though, because it does make a lot of sense.

https://youtu.be/CnkpdpjGgTY

Easter is NOT pagan

YouTube

@vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay the name "Easter" may derive from that of an Anglo-Saxon goddess, but we have almost no evidence for that - literally two lines in a history written by a medieval monk who had no first-hand knowledge of paganism. The festival (which in every non-Germanic European language is called some variant of "Pesach") is certainly not derived from Eostre's rites, if they even existed. See the series of posts starting at https://cavalorn.livejournal.com/502368.html

(I enjoyed the comic, though!)

@pozorvlak @vwbusguy @Natasha_Jay In Icelandic we have "Páskar" which is the same word, but until recently (meaning a couple of centuries) it was often preceded with something related to "spring" because there was another period of festivities celebrating the rise of the sun - that one was called "Vetrarpáskar" or the "winter-easter". Christmas was just one of the masses occurring at the winter-easter period, more commonly called "Jól", and plenty of other saints had their mass in that period.