While western Christians have completed their celebrations of the Lenten season and Easter, eastern Christians are just gearing up for their own. How did that happen? How did the eastern and western Easters diverge? Curiously, this had something to do with the Roman empire before the advent of Christianity, and much to do with what happened in the empire later on.
Generally speaking, one of the early challenges for the early Christians was that of mapping their new religion onto older Roman institutions. For some of their early festivals, they simply stapled them on to Roman holidays of great popularity and long duration. That's how Christmas came to be associated with and overlapped with the Roman Saturnalia. According to the evidence provided by the Venerable Bede, the feast that his parishioners called "Easter" even took its name from an Anglo-Saxon springtime goddess named Eostre.
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