No one is 100% sure where the English word ‘Easter’ came from! In every other European language, the word for the festival of Easter comes from a variation of the word ‘Passover.’ One theory is that the word Easter comes from the Anglo Saxon month ‘Eostremonath,’ which was about the time of April, when the Christian festival was held.
Easter Bunny
Another theory (and the most likely) is that the term ‘Ostern’ actually came from an early Latin term for Easter week ‘hebdomada alba’ (which means ‘white week’). So Easter became known as ‘Ostern’ in German and then ‘Easter’ in English.
The Passover festival dates about 4,000 years ago when Jewish people remember that God saved them from slavery in Egypt. Jesus celebrated the Passover in the first month of the Jewish New Year (14-15 of the month of Nisan). The Jewish calendar follows the cycle of the moon, so the date changes a bit every year.
The first Jewish Christians added Easter celebrations to the Passover festival and because Jesus rose from the dead on a Sunday, so Easter Day became the first Sunday after Passover. Easter is celebrated around the same time of year that Jesus was slain at the time of the Jewish Passover festival.
Since its origins, Easter has been a time of celebration and feasting and many traditional Easter games and many customs developed, such as egg rolling, egg tapping, pace egging, cascarones or confetti eggs and egg decorating. Today Easter is commercially important, seeing wide sales of greeting cards and confectionery such as chocolate Easter eggs as well as other Easter food such as turkey or ham. Even many non-Christians celebrate these features of the holiday while ignoring the religious aspects. Nowadays child entertainers and kindergartens invent various new Easter games, often adapting well-known games to Easter topics, such as word puzzles involving Easter-related words. Courtesy of Wikipedia