Holidays & Festivals

224 entries. Click any to see everything it connects to.

The festivals and holy days of the religious calendars: fixed and movable feasts, fasts, new years, solstice and equinox observances and commemorations. Each entry records the tradition, the calendar the date is reckoned by, and what the day marks. Dates that look irregular in the civil calendar are usually regular in the calendar that governs them.

Facts

Overview

Entries in the Atlas: 224
What Defines This Grouping: Days a tradition's calendar sets apart - feasts, fasts, festivals, high holy days and lesser observances - each reckoned in the calendar of the tradition that keeps it. Those calendars are lunar, lunisolar, sidereal-solar or tropical-solar and none is the civil Gregorian year, so a date fixed in its own reckoning moves against the civil calendar year by year. 1

Sources

The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-Reckoning Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, 1999, Part II: Calendars and Chronology

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The Festivals and Holy Days

This category holds the festivals and holy days of the religious calendars: fixed and movable feasts, fasts, new years, solstice and equinox observances, and commemorations of events and figures. Each entry records the tradition, the calendar by which the date is reckoned, and what the day marks.

Holy days give a religion its year, a repeating cycle of remembrance and renewal that structures communal life. Some commemorate an event held to be historical or mythic; others mark a turn of the season or the calendar; others are set aside for fasting, penitence or joy.

Reckoning the Date

Because traditions use different calendars, the same festival can fall on different dates from year to year, and movable feasts (Easter, the Islamic festivals, the Hindu festivals set by lunar dates), shift against the civil calendar in ways the entries explain. The reckoning of dates is itself part of a festival's character, tying it to the calendars gathered elsewhere in the atlas.

The holidays group by kind (feasts, fasts, festivals, high holy days and observances), so a reader can compare, for instance, the major fasts of several traditions together.