Here's how Easter turned into a holiday with pastel bunnies and chocolate eggs

Easter is the most important feast day on the Christian calendar: a celebration centered around Jesus Christ rising from the dead.

So, what do egg-hiding, floppy-eared bunnies, chocolate encased in colorful plastic shells, and pretty flowers have to do with any of that?

Such symbols are sometimes written off as a sort of paganistic residue, left over from before Christianity swept across Europe.

But that's probably not true - or, at least, not entirely true.

Eostre is frequently cited as a pre-Christian Germanic spring goddess (who hung out with a rabbit, no less). Early Christians are said to have co-opted her festival's symbols and rituals - and even her name! But the only documentary evidence for this goddess exists in early medieval monk and scholar Bede the Venerable's telling.

The evidence for Eostre-worship being the basis of Easter traditions is thin, at best, as the Guardian's Adrian Bott previously asserted. It's not that it's impossible that Eostre was indeed a popular pagan goddess, or that such pre-Christian influences survive today - it's just that there's really not much concrete to base that assertion on.

Historians in the 19th and 20th century often argued that most medieval Christians were actually just thinly veiled pagans. However, that trend has changed in recent years. As English historian Ronald Hutton put it in his article "How Pagan Were Medieval English Peasants?": "... there is no good evidence for a survival of active paganism among the English population after the early eleventh century."

That doesn't mean that there aren't some strange and unusual beginnings for some of Easter's most popular symbols, however.

Here are some popular Easter symbols with surprising origins: