The calendar was inaugurated by the Bab, the prophet herald of the Baha'i Faith, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Baha'u'llah gave it its binding form in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, so its epoch, year one of the Baha'i Era, is fixed to 1844, the year of the Bab's declaration in Shiraz. Ayyam-i-Ha, the four or five days before the final month, has no fixed liturgical content of its own; Baha'i communities keep it instead as a period of hospitality, charity and gift giving, visiting friends and preparing for the discipline that follows immediately.
The month of Ala is a nineteen day sunrise to sunset fast, paralleling Ramadan in structure though rooted in its own scriptural instruction, and it ends precisely at Naw-Ruz. Baha'i communities also mark the first day of every nineteen day month with a Nineteen Day Feast, a combined devotional, consultative and social gathering that is the calendar's most frequent point of contact with ordinary life rather than an annual one.
None of this is historical description. The calendar is in daily use by Baha'is worldwide today, coordinated globally by the Universal House of Justice in Haifa, and it is this administrative body, not local custom, that has adjusted details such as the Tehran meridian equinox rule in living memory, which is why the calendar's mechanics have continued to be actively refined well into the twenty first century.