Happy Easter 2011!

Today we celebrate the brown-skinned, anti-war socialist who gave away free healthcare.

Some info on the indigenous (European) roots of Easter:The modern English term Easter developed from the Old English word Ēastre or Ēostre (IPA: [ˈæːɑstre, ˈeːostre]), which itself developed prior to 899. The name refers to Eostur-monath (Old English "Ēostre month"), a month of the Germanic calendar attested by Bede, who writes that the month is named after the goddess Ēostre of Anglo-Saxon paganism. Bede notes that Ēostur-monath was the equivalent to the month of April, yet that feasts held in her honor during Ēostur-monath had gone out of use by the time of his writing and had been replaced with the Christian custom of "Paschal season."

Using comparative linguistic evidence from continental Germanic sources, the 19th century scholar Jacob Grimm proposed the existence of a cognate form of Ēostre among the pre-Christian beliefs of the continental Germanic peoples, whose name he reconstructed as *Ostara.

Since Grimm's time, linguists have identified the goddess as a Germanic form of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn, *Hausos, and theories connecting Ēostre with records of Germanic Easter customs (including hares and eggs) have been proposed.