Appearance
12.2 — Festivals, Customs and Why We Do That
Most customs that feel ancient are between fifty and two hundred years old, and most that feel arbitrary are solving a real problem in a way nobody remembers.
India's regional festivals
Why does each Indian region have a different principal festival?
Because Indian religious practice has always been local first, and because in several cases a specific person in the last two hundred years deliberately turned a household observance into a public one.
Durga Puja in Bengal honours the goddess's victory over the buffalo demon. Its modern form — the community sarbojanin puja, funded by subscription, with competitively designed temporary pavilions called pandals — dates from around 1910. Before that it was largely an aristocratic household event. The shift from private to public was partly nationalist: a mass gathering that the colonial state could not object to. It was inscribed by UNESCO on its intangible heritage list in 2021.
Ganesh Chaturthi in Maharashtra is the clearest case. It was a household festival until Bal Gangadhar Tilak promoted it from 1893 as a large public event, explicitly as a way of assembling people under British restrictions on political gatherings. The ten-day public form, the enormous idols and the immersion processions are all part of that revival.
Onam in Kerala is a harvest festival, and its story is unusual: it commemorates the annual return of Mahabali, an asura king whose reign was so just and prosperous that the gods became uneasy, and whom Vishnu pushed into the underworld while granting him one visit a year. The festival is a welcome for a demon king, celebrated across religious communities in Kerala, which fits the point about asuras in 10.4.
Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Bihu in Assam, Baisakhi in Punjab, Lohri, Makar Sankranti and Ugadi are agricultural markers — sowing, harvest, or the sun's northward turn — which is why several of them fall on nearly fixed Gregorian dates while lunar festivals move.
Why is the emotional attachment so strong?
Because these festivals do things that have nothing to do with belief, and would be missed even by somebody who believed nothing.
They are the fixed point of the year that brings people home. Migration for work is the dominant fact of modern Indian life, and the festival is when the family reassembles. The emotional weight is attached to the reunion as much as to the deity.
They are organised by neighbours. A pandal or a mandal is built by a committee of people who live on the same street, funded by their subscriptions, competing with the next street. That is a working local institution, and for many people it is the only one they participate in directly.
They mark time. A person can date their own life by which puja they were at. Annual repetition with the same music, the same food and the same smells produces exactly the kind of dense, retrievable memory described in 4.3, which is why childhood festivals are remembered with a vividness that ordinary years are not.
And they are inclusive in practice, whatever the theology says. Durga Puja and Onam are attended across religions in their regions, and the food, the shopping and the public art are available to anybody in the street.
Why do Hindu festival dates move each year?
Because most are set by a lunisolar calendar and the civil calendar is solar, per 2.7.
A lunar month is about 29.5 days and twelve of them fall about 11 days short of a solar year, so festivals fixed to a lunar date drift earlier — and an extra month is inserted periodically to pull them back. The net effect is a festival that moves within a window of a few weeks rather than circulating through the seasons as Islamic dates do.
The exceptions are the solar festivals. Makar Sankranti and Pongal are tied to the sun's entry into Capricorn and fall on 14 or 15 January nearly every year.
Elsewhere
What is Thanksgiving, and what is the accurate version?
An American and Canadian harvest holiday, held on the fourth Thursday of November in the United States, centred on a large family meal.
The founding story — English settlers at Plymouth in 1621 sharing a harvest meal with the Wampanoag people — is partly documented. A 1621 gathering did happen and Wampanoag people were present, in large numbers, and contemporary accounts describe fowl and deer rather than turkey.
What the story omits is everything around it. The settlers survived their first years substantially because of Wampanoag assistance and because they took stored food from abandoned villages — abandoned because an epidemic, probably introduced by earlier European contact, had killed a very large share of the coastal population in the years immediately before. Within a generation the relationship collapsed into a war that destroyed the Wampanoag as an independent power.
The modern holiday is not descended from 1621 in any direct way. It was established as a national annual observance by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, as a deliberate act of national unification, after a decades-long campaign by the writer Sarah Josepha Hale. The Pilgrim origin story was attached later and became standard in schools around 1900.
Many Native American communities observe the day as a National Day of Mourning, and have since 1970.
Roosevelt moved the date once, in 1939, to lengthen the Christmas shopping season, which produced enough public anger that Congress fixed it in law in 1941.
Why is Christmas on 25 December?
Nobody knows the date of the birth, and the Gospels give no season. 25 December was fixed in Rome by the fourth century, and there are two explanations, which are not exclusive.
The first: it coincides with existing Roman winter festivals — Saturnalia in mid-December, and the festival of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, on 25 December — and placing a Christian feast on an existing holiday is the standard pattern described in 10.2.
The second: an early calculation held that a prophet died on the same date he was conceived, and the crucifixion was dated to 25 March, giving a birth nine months later.
The tree, the cards and much of the modern shape are nineteenth century. The Christmas tree is a German custom popularised in Britain after an 1848 illustration of Victoria and Albert with one. The commercial Christmas card dates from 1843, the same year as Dickens's A Christmas Carol, which did a great deal to establish the holiday's modern emphasis on family and charity.
The red-suited Santa was not invented by Coca-Cola, which is the most repeated claim about it. Coca-Cola's advertising from 1931 standardised and spread the image enormously, and red-suited Santas appear in American illustration decades earlier, notably in Thomas Nast's cartoons from the 1860s.
Which festivals are shared across religions and cultures?
More than most people assume, and usually because they mark the same astronomical event.
The spring equinox carries Nowruz in Iran and Central Asia — over 3,000 years old and now a UN-recognised international day — plus Holi, Ostara, and the calculation that sets Easter.
Midwinter carries Christmas, Yule, Dongzhi in China, Yalda in Iran, and Makar Sankranti a few weeks later.
Autumn harvest carries Onam, Pongal, Sukkot, Mid-Autumn Festival, Chuseok and Thanksgiving.
Festivals of light in autumn — Diwali, Hanukkah, Loi Krathong — cluster in the darkening half of the year in the northern hemisphere.
This is not evidence of a shared origin. It is evidence that agricultural societies at similar latitudes had the same things to mark, which is the same reasoning as the myth patterns in 10.5.
Everyday customs
Why do we shake hands, and why does it vary?
The usual explanation is that an open right hand shows no weapon, and that the shake dislodges anything hidden in a sleeve. It is plausible, ancient depictions of clasped hands exist, and there is no documentary proof of the origin.
What is documented is that the handshake as an ordinary greeting between equals spread substantially through Quaker practice in the seventeenth century, since Quakers refused to bow or remove hats to social superiors and used a handshake with everybody as an assertion of equality.
The variation is large and worth knowing. The Indian namaste and the Thai wai avoid contact entirely and encode relative status in how high the hands are held and how deep the bow. Japanese bowing depth and duration are finely graded. In much of the Middle East and South Asia the left hand is avoided for greeting and eating, for the practical hygiene reason that predates plumbing.
The pandemic produced a real natural experiment in whether these conventions are changeable, and the answer was that handshaking dropped sharply and then largely returned, which suggests they are more durable than they look.
Why do people say "bless you" after a sneeze?
There are three standard explanations and no way to choose between them.
Plague: Pope Gregory the Great is said to have ordered the blessing during a sixth-century epidemic in which sneezing was a symptom.
The soul: a belief that a sneeze could expel the soul, or admit something, requiring a protective phrase.
The heart: a belief that the heart stops during a sneeze, which is false — heart rhythm can change momentarily from the pressure change, but nothing stops.
Nearly every language has an equivalent phrase, which is the interesting part. German Gesundheit wishes health, Hindi and Urdu speakers may say jeete raho, and the Japanese convention is to say nothing at all and for the sneezer to apologise.
Why do we blow out candles on a birthday cake?
The custom appears to be German, from the eighteenth century — Kinderfeste — with a candle for each year plus one for the year to come, kept alight all day and blown out in the evening.
The wish is attached to the smoke, in the older explanation: smoke rises, carrying the wish upward. Sweetened cakes for birthdays became common in the nineteenth century once sugar was cheap, and the whole package spread internationally in the twentieth.
"Happy Birthday to You" was under a claimed copyright until 2016, when a US court ruled the claim invalid and the song entered the public domain — which is why films made before that date so often use a different song in restaurant scenes.
Why do we clink glasses, and why not with water?
Clinking has several stories — sharing a drop of each drink to prove neither is poisoned, or making noise to drive off spirits — and none is documented.
The prohibition on toasting with water is a real convention in several European traditions, most strongly in Germany and among naval officers, and is usually explained by an association with the dead: in Greek and Roman practice, libations to the dead were water. The naval version holds that toasting with water wishes the recipient a watery grave.
Eye contact during the clink is nearly obligatory in Germany and France and carries a superstition about consequences for failing to do it, which is unusually specific.
Why is thirteen unlucky, and why is there no thirteenth floor?
The superstition is European and not universal — in much of East Asia the unlucky number is four, because the word for four and the word for death are near-homophones in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, which is why buildings there skip the fourth floor.
The European explanations offered for thirteen include twelve being a number of completeness — months, zodiac signs, hours — with thirteen as the disruptive extra, and the thirteenth guest at the Last Supper.
The commercial consequence is real. A substantial share of tall buildings in Western countries label floors 12, 14, without a 13, and airlines skip row 13. The floor is still there; only the label changes. Whether the fear affects behaviour measurably is disputed, but the buildings are built as if it does, which is the only evidence that matters to a developer.
What comes next
The next page leaves human customs for the rest of the living world — the animals that hold records, and the ones whose reputations are entirely undeserved.