Easter is closely related to Austria. The aus- or aur- Indo-European root meant to rise or shine, and was quite an important word because they worshiped the (rising) sun. Among the derivatives are aurora (Latin for dawn), East itself, the Ostrogoths, the Orient, an origin (dawn), and the country of Austria (�sterreich in German — the east kingdom.) To abort is literally to "un-arise", and an aborigine is run together from the Latin phrase ab origine, from the beginning, denoting the original inhabitants of a territory. (The Latin phrase has been felt so strongly that it has prevented the word from mutating into typical English pronunciation, which would presumably have been a-BOR-i-jin.)
Easter was a pagan Germanic name for their sunrise festival on the first day of Spring, when the sun returned across the equinox, and the early missionaries appropriated the name for their own festival on about the same date. (Christmas is on December 25 to provide an alternative to pagan Yule festivals at the Winter Solstice. The actual date of Jesus's birth is unknown. The only hint in the Gospels is the comment about "shepherds in the hills keeping watch over their flocks by night," and this is an activity that takes place in late summer in Palestine.)
It's no coincidence that the Christian Easter is near the first day of Spring, because it is tied to the date of the Jewish Passover, and that seems to have been another "sun-crossing-over" festival originally. The Vernal Equinox was also the time in many cultures when the old god died and then, usually three days later, arose again from the dead at sunrise, symbolizing life returning to Earth with the end of Winter and the coming of Spring. [31Dec05] (Christianity speaks of Jesus rising on "the third day", but the gospels are quite definite that the interval was only a day and a half — early Friday afternoon to sometime before dawn on Sunday.) All Souls' Day is on top of another pagan holiday — November 1 was New Years Day (Samhain) in the Keltic calendar, and New Years Eve (i.e., Halloween) was traditionally the night when the sidhe (supernatural folk) roamed the world. (The other big Keltic festival was their mid-year day, Beltane, i.e., May Day, but the Christians didn't confiscate that one, the workers did.) Keltic spelling is odd by English standards — Samhain is pronounced "sown", and sidhe is pronounced "she". (Banshee is a phonetic version of Keltic bean sidhe, woman of the fairies; like many other Gaelic terms, its familiarity in English is due to Sir Walter Scott. A banshee's wailing was supposed to portend a death.)
Note that orientation, meaning to get one's directions straight, shows that the original important direction was East, not North, and in fact for many centuries the word literally meant "face the east", particularly for constructing churches. The Indo-European words for north and south were the same as the ones for left and right, proving the same point. (See the discussion of "deus" and "day" below for another set of rise-and-shine words.) For that matter, the southern territory of Yemen means "on the right" in Arabic and is therefore related to the Hebrew name Benjamin, son of the right [hand]. Some scholars believe that the Biblical tribe of Benjamin meant "southerners" and was unrelated to the personal name.
The opposite of orient (rising) is occident, setting. Latin cadere actually means to fall, and that which falls to us can either be an occasion, a chance (originally a gambling term, i.e., the fall of dice), a case in the legal sense, or an accident. The falling sound at the end of a musical piece is either a cadence or a cadenza, depending on whether one is French or Italian. Cascade is another derivative, as is a deciduous tree, where the leaves "fall away". West, by the way, seems to be another Indo-European "setting" word. Both Latin vesper and Greek hesperos mean "evening", but Sanskrit avas means "downward".
PS — Why do Americans insist that China and Japan are in the "Far East?" They may be in that direction as seen from Europe but they are in the WEST as seen from the United States, and I think we should not continue with this effete reminder of England! Note that England and France would then become the Near East, and Russia, Israel and Egypt the Far East, since India is more or less half way around from the USA. The British distinguished between the Near East (the Levant, Arabia, Turkey), the Middle East (Persia, India), and the Far East (China, Japan).
This habit is catching. The Romans referred to Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, etc. as the Levant, from Latin lev-, to rise, as in levitate, and Japan is from the Chinese Jih-pun, sunrise; the islands are in the east as seen from China. The first notice of the place which came to Europe was via Marco Polo, who spelled the Chinese he heard as Chipangu. Over the centuries the Japanese language changed the Chinese jih- (sun) to ni-, so that their own name for their country is rendered as Nippon in English, often translated as the "Land of the Rising Sun". Note the rising sun on the Japanese flag. This makes perfect sense to the Chinese, but is illogical for the Japanese themselves! It does seem odd that both "Levant" and "Japan" translate to the same thing in English, but then so do Anatolia (from a Byzantine Greek word for "rising") and Saracen (from Arabic sharqi, east, literally "rising"!) A sirocco is an east wind, also from Arabic. I already mentioned that Austria was also named from the point of view of people who lived to the west of them.
By the way, the country of Lebanon looks like it might be related to Levant, but it isn't; it's from a Semitic word for "white" and originally referred to the snowy mountain range that dominates the interior of the country. Therefore, Lebanon translates into Spanish as "Sierra Nevada".