I was taught that in the early days of the church people were becoming believers but were still "celebrating" some of the pagan festivals. In order to break this habit the church leaders introduced the celebrations of Easter and Christmas to allow them to celebrate something in a similar way but with Jesus at the core of it instead of the pagan beliefs. Easter includes some of the elements of the pagan festival such as eggs, chicks and new life, but instead of leading people away from Jesus they were used to lead people to Him.
The whole bunny thing is something that as far as I know was added by Americans much, much later.
So yes the OP is fairly accurate in saying Easter is not biblical but that doesnt mean its pagan, in fact just the opposite, it is so people didnt fall back into pagan practices.
What you share above is something commonly repeated, but is actually not true.
The Christian Feast of Pascha (usually called "Easter" in English) goes about as far back as can be in Christian history. It was universal and ubiquitous among Christians throughout the known world by the mid 2nd century.
When Anicetus was bishop of Rome (157-168 AD) he and Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna met together and discussed many things at length. When they came to the topic of the celebration of Pascha they differed.
In Smyrna and other parts of the Christian East the method to calculate the Feast of Pascha was effectively to simply follow the Jewish calculation of Passover; and so the Christian Paschal Feast occurred on the same day as the Jewish Passover--Nissan 14th. While in Rome, and other parts of the Christian West, as well as in Alexandria the practice was to celebrate the Paschal Feast on the first Sunday after the Jewish Passover.
These two Christian pastors both asserted that the customs of their practice dated back to the Apostles themselves; and they agreed that there was no reason to fight over the matter.
Over time the Quartodeciman tradition (Pascha on Nissan 14th) slowly faded from usage, while other methods of computation, similar to what Rome and Alexandria did, became more common. By the time of the Council of Nicea this method of computation had become nearly universal--with some regional differences. The Council of Nicea, which had gathered chiefly to address the Arian Controversy, also took the time to produce a standardized way to compute the Paschal Feast. They settled on the computation method that was already being used by the Church in Alexandria: The Paschal Feast was to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon (the first full moon after March 21st, the spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere).
That's why the Paschal Feast this year (2021) is on Sunday, the 4th of April. Because the Paschal Full Moon is March 28th this year. It's a simple way to calculate using things which are ubiquitous in nature--the earth's revolution around the sun and the phases of the moon.
So why is the Paschal Feast--Pascha for short--called "Easter" in English? To that we need to turn to a bit of English and European history.
In the 5th century we get into what historians refer to as the Migration Period, a period of massive migration of Germanic tribes and peoples across Europe. It's the same thing that resulted in the fall of Rome to the Visigoths and Vandals. It's why France is called France and not Gaul. In this period was when the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain took place. As Rome pulled out of Britain, the power vaccuum was filled by invading Anglo-Saxons.
After the Anglo-Saxon invasion, they were converted to Christianity by both Irish missionary-monks and missionaries from mainland Europe. A man by the name of Augustine (different Augustine) was sent by the bishop of Rome to establish a diocese in southern Britain--which became the Archdiocese of Canterbury, and to this day the Archbishop of Canterbury is still the spiritual head of the English Church. Under the work of Augustine of Canterbury and the Irish monks the Anglo-Saxons became Christians.
Fast forward several centuries, and we have an Anglo-Saxon monk by the name of Bede writing his possibly most well-known work,
On the Reckoning of Time. In a rather brief section in the work he says he felt it was important to discuss how the Anglo-Saxons keep time, and offers the names of the 12 months which the Anglo-Saxons use. He writes that the equivalent Anglo-Saxon month to Roman April was called Eostermonath, which according to Bede gets its name from a goddess named Eostre at one time worshiped by the Anglo-Saxons prior to their conversion to Christianity. But they had long ago abandoned all their pagan practices and now only followed the Christian religion.
And that's it. That's everything Bede has to say about that. And we don't have any other sources. In fact, nobody other than Bede even mentions a goddess named Eostre that was worshipped by the formerly Pagan Anglo-Saxons. Not a single record, no written history, no archeological evidence, nothing. Which has raised the question among many scholars about the possibility that Bede may be wrong--that there was no goddess worshiped by the Anglo-Saxons named Eostre, and so Bede's etymology of Eostermonath was incorrect. It wouldn't be the first time ancient or medieval people were mistaken about the etymology of a word, false etymologies are actually pretty common.
So if Eostre wasn't the name of a goddess, then what could have been the reason for the name Eostermonath? One theory is that it really does just mean something like dawn or dawning month--the month in which the sun has began to rise earlier in the morning each day. By connecting Eostre with old word for "dawn"--like our modern word "east", the direction of the rising sun.
The simple truth of the matter is we don't know, Bede is our only source, and he could be mistaken. But in either case you'll notice that the only thing "pagan" here that could exist is the name "Easter" itself. But worrying about that is like worrying about the fact that the days of the week are named after Roman and Germanic gods (Sun's Day, Moon's Day, Tiw's Day, Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Frigga's Day, Saturn's Day). Or that many of the names of the months are named after Roman gods--January-Janus, May-Maya, June-Juno, etc.
To which we might quote Shakespeare, "A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet."
Call it "Easter", or call it by the more ancient and more universal Pascha, it's the same thing--the Feast of our Lord's Glorious Resurrection from the Dead.
The topic of Christmas is a much more complicated subject, but one which I'd be willing to go into discussion about if you'd be interested.
-CryptoLutheran