Originally Posted by tore

According to the monk Bede who wrote a treatise De temporum ratione (The Reckoning of Time) in 725, the english term Easter itself comes from the old english name Ēostre or Ēastre - the name of a germanic goddess who was celebrated at march equinox.

Modern easter and march equinox don't overlap perfectly (it was march 20th this year), but I would assume that christianity has just taken over a different religious holiday and if that was not the celebration of Ēastre, a feasible hypothesis it seems to me, then it could have been a different one.