15.3 — Festivals and Holidays of the World

Nobody knows when Jesus was born. The gospels do not give a date, and the detail about shepherds watching their flocks by night suggests a season other than midwinter.

The 25 December date appears in Roman sources from the fourth century.

Two explanations compete and both have evidence. One is that it was placed to coincide with existing Roman midwinter observances — Saturnalia in mid-December and the festival of the unconquered sun on 25 December — either to displace them or to absorb them. The other, the "calculation hypothesis", is that early Christians reasoned from a belief that prophets died on the date of their conception, placed the crucifixion at 25 March, and counted nine months.

The evidence does not settle it and the general pattern is not in doubt: midwinter is celebrated in nearly every culture at that latitude, because the days stop getting shorter, and Christmas sits on that.

The seasonal foundation

Strip away the specific religious content of festivals across cultures and a pattern remains.

Midwinter, around the solstice. Christmas, Yule, Saturnalia, Dongzhi in China, Yalda in Iran, Hanukkah, and the various Diwali-adjacent light festivals. The common element is light and fire in the darkest period, and the common message is that the year turns.

Spring, around the equinox. Easter, Passover, Nowruz, Holi, Vaisakhi, Songkran, Qingming. Renewal, cleaning, sowing, and eggs and new clothes as recurring motifs.

Harvest, in autumn. Thanksgiving, Sukkot, Mid-Autumn Festival, Chuseok, Durga Puja and Onam in their agricultural aspect, and European harvest festivals.

Remembering the dead, generally in autumn as the year dies. All Souls, Día de Muertos, Obon in Japan, Qingming in China, Pitru Paksha in India.

And New Year, wherever the calendar puts it.

The consistency across unconnected cultures suggests these are responses to the same physical facts — the agricultural cycle and the solar year — rather than borrowings.

The individual cases

Christmas. Much of what is now standard is Victorian. The decorated tree was a German custom popularised in Britain after Prince Albert; Dickens's A Christmas Carol in 1843 substantially shaped the modern emphasis on family, charity and feasting; and the commercial Christmas card dates from the same decade. Santa Claus derives from Saint Nicholas, a fourth-century bishop of Myra associated with secret gift-giving, transmitted through Dutch Sinterklaas to America. The red suit was already common in illustration before Coca-Cola's advertising from the 1930s, which standardised rather than invented it.

Easter is a movable feast because it follows a lunisolar rule: the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, a formula fixed at Nicaea in 325 (Chapter 5.8). Its English name probably derives from a Germanic goddess of spring, on the evidence of Bede in the eighth century, which is a single source. Eggs and rabbits are fertility symbols of the season.

Thanksgiving, since the user's world includes it and its history is instructive.

The standard story is a 1621 harvest feast shared by English settlers at Plymouth and the Wampanoag people.

What the record supports. A harvest gathering did occur, described in a single brief contemporary letter. The Wampanoag presence is recorded. The relationship at that moment was a real alliance — Massasoit had reasons of his own, having lost a large part of his people to an epidemic and facing rival groups.

What followed is the part usually omitted. Within a generation, the relationship had collapsed into King Philip's War of 1675–76, one of the deadliest conflicts per capita in American history, which devastated the Wampanoag and other New England nations.

And the holiday's modern form is nineteenth century. Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned for decades for a national Thanksgiving; Lincoln proclaimed it in 1863, during the Civil War, explicitly as a unifying observance. The date was fixed by Congress in 1941 — and had been moved by Roosevelt in 1939 to lengthen the Christmas shopping season, a change unpopular enough to be reversed.

Since 1970, a National Day of Mourning has been held at Plymouth by Native American participants, which is part of the current observance and belongs in any account of it.

Chinese New Year, on the lunisolar calendar, falling between late January and late February. The world's largest annual human migration, as hundreds of millions travel to family. Red for luck, firecrackers to drive off misfortune, the twelve-animal zodiac cycle, and money in red envelopes.

Ramadan and Eid. Fasting from dawn to sunset for a lunar month, and because the Islamic calendar is purely lunar (Chapter 15.1), the month moves through the seasons — which means fasting hours are far longer in a northern summer than a northern winter, and there is a substantial body of religious jurisprudence about how Muslims at very high latitudes should handle it.

Nowruz, the Persian new year at the spring equinox, over 3,000 years old and Zoroastrian in origin (Chapter 4.7), celebrated across Iran, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Afghanistan and by Parsis in India. It is a good example of a pre-Islamic festival surviving inside an Islamic culture.

Day of the Dead in Mexico, which fuses an indigenous commemoration of the dead with Catholic All Souls — and its character is celebratory rather than mournful, with the dead treated as returning guests, which is a genuinely different emotional register from most European mourning traditions.

Carnival, in Rio, Venice, New Orleans and elsewhere, immediately before Lent. The inversion type from Chapter 15.2: hierarchy suspended, masks, licensed excess, immediately before a period of restraint.

And the secular ones. May Day as international workers' day, from the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886. International Women's Day, from the socialist movement in the early twentieth century. And the national days, which are the newest category and which are almost entirely nineteenth and twentieth-century constructions (Chapter 10.7).

The invented ones

A category worth naming because it is growing.

Mother's Day was campaigned for by Anna Jarvis in the United States and recognised in 1914. She spent her later years campaigning against its commercialisation and was reportedly arrested at a protest against it.

Valentine's Day has a thin and probably fictional connection to a third-century martyr; its romantic association appears in Chaucer in the fourteenth century and its commercial form is Victorian.

Black Friday and Singles' Day are entirely commercial, the second created by Chinese e-commerce marketing from a student observance and now the largest shopping day in the world by volume.

And the pattern is Chapter 10.7's invented tradition operating in real time, where the process can be watched rather than reconstructed.

What holidays actually do

Beyond the four functions in Chapter 15.2, two more that are specific to the modern form.

They coordinate rest. A holiday that everyone takes at once is qualitatively different from the same number of days taken individually, because it allows collective activity. This is the strongest argument for public holidays over additional individual leave, and it is why the weekend matters more than its length suggests (Chapter 15.4).

And they are contested, because they encode a view of history. Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples' Day in the United States. Australia Day and the alternative name used by Aboriginal Australians. Statues and commemorations everywhere. Chapter 6.18 made the general point: what an event is called is the argument, and a holiday is a name written into the calendar.

Where this shows up in your life

Your public holidays, which in India are unusually numerous and unusually varied by state — because a federal country with many religions ends up recognising many of them, with a mixture of national holidays and state-specific optional ones.

And the observation worth taking from this chapter. Nearly every festival you can name sits on top of an older seasonal observance, has acquired its current form within the last two centuries, and is genuinely meaningful anyway.

The recency of a tradition and its significance are unrelated. A hundred and fifty years of families doing the same thing on the same day is a real inheritance, and knowing when it started is not a debunking.

What the next page covers

Chapter 15.4 covers the shape of an ordinary life — why the working week is five days and the weekend two, why the working day is eight hours, why retirement happens around sixty, why schooling runs the years it does, and how each of these was fought for or imposed rather than being natural. It is the chapter about how the structure of your own week was built.