For all the cute and awesome tales around Eostre, Ostre, and whatnot, the pagan traditions around the Spring equinox never knew her. Now if you told me that Bede, the Angle monk from north England around 725 BC, came up with a Mary Magdalene figure for long gone pagans to provide some background material for Saint Jerome's consolidation of the vulgate Bible in the 5th Century (AD), I'd totally be down for. With the changing world since about the 300 AD, intellectual discourse was forming the Christ cycle, and even as late as the 8th century things were a bit amorphous around the edges.
What with Jesus's birthday being officially removed from the Vernal equinox to December 25th, something had to fill the rites of Spring at the time of Saint Jerome's adulthood. This had to signify the gift giving of Saturnalia instead of the lusty nature of Spring Break. Since the skull-bashings of Nicodemia the son of god was the same as the sky god and therefore not to be associated with fertility rights. So the Christ-figure's fall would be moved to be closer to people getting some time to tend to the hay fields, leading to some rolling of hay that was not sanctioned by the parents. But alas for falling, there is redemption in Church-approved marriage licenses. And then the reformed harlot of Mary of Magdella, more often than not accompanied by, if not just conflated with the Virgin Mary (God's Mom), got to play a role.
The Prussian advertising character Borussia has had more "worshipers" than this Eostre. But the goddess and her earlier Christian archetypes have some great fantasy yarns around them, even if they're all probably from the ancient times of the first I-Phone release. Ostarra saw a cold goose in snow, (because geese are hot weather animals?) and changed it to a hare. The hare was much warmer, (because goose down isn't warm?) so it thanked her by laying a colorful egg. Then there is the one where either Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary, teleports to Rome from Jerusalem to brag to the pagan emperor about the rebirth of Christ by giving him rotten eggs, which she purifies with her matronly, superpowers derived from not having sex. That last one is a bit too deep for the average pagan of Southern Baptist origins, so in these modernest of times, the story-masters just have the egg turn Easter-eggy with a cross on it without a woman being all witchy. Folklore spun by people that live in apartments and don't know that Pontus Pilot was never a Roman emperor.
While I am at it, there is just no historical evidence of Germanic people's being that big into rabbits as deities, nor rabbits delivering eggs. The animals were and remain so, great punchlines. What there is is surviving Christian works where rabbits and eggs being cited as proof of immaculate conception while flies were proof of less than Holy spontaneous generation. Boiled eggs also were the Happy Meal of the Dark Ages, dunk them in beet juice and have the kids feed their faces with these lunches during extremely long masses on Easter Holy Day. Heck if you get the kids trying to sprinkle water on a rabbit's tale, while looking for hidden eggs, mom and dad can get around to their Spring Break, that means MAKING BABIES, in between the 4th and the 119th worship session of the day. Wallah a pleasant outing out in the fields around the county's church. But remember the Virgin Mary, err Mary Magdelene, err some reformed slut that God approves of is watching so don't have too much fun.
So to my whimsical and more revisionist fantasy friends, Happy Easter. May the most Christian of icons of the Easter Bunny and colored eggs not disrupt any crypto-racist symbolism about pagan Germany.
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