Holidays are part of every human culture we currently know about, going back as far as we have records. There are a few that are nearly universal – planting and harvest festivals, solstices, equinoxes. Unsurprisingly, these tend to be based around natural cycles of the sun or the seasons.
There are others that are based around more human-centric things, which means they’re different in different cultures. Nearly every country has an official holiday celebrating its nationhood, and they’re all different, because they’re chosen to celebrate the country’s founding, independence, unification, liberation, or the birth/success/coronation of the person who everyone reveres as the one who established the state. Almost every country has one or more holidays celebrating significant military victories or peace treaties, which, again, mostly happen on different dates. Many celebrate the birthday of the current ruler, which changes periodically when a new official steps in. And many have days memorializing particularly tragic events, such as 9-11 in the U.S.
In the Midwestern U.S., where I live, there are many, many small towns that have annual festivals celebrating their particular claim to fame – whether that’s Strawberry Days, Pancake Days, Defeat of Jesse James Day, the Festival of Owls, Paul Bunyan, Laura Ingalls Wilder… the list goes on, and that’s just off the top of my head. Yes, some of them are tourist bait, but all of them are also local celebrations.
All of these significant days have customs that go with them. Some are widespread, like having a decorated evergreen tree in the living room at Christmas; others are family ones (I have friends who wouldn’t dream of skipping their annual family visit to the tree farm to choose and cut their Christmas tree; that’s one that no one in my family has done for at least a hundred years). And all of these days and customs form a background in our lives. In the U.S., even people who don’t observe the Thanksgiving turkey-dinner-and-football tradition make jokes about it.
It is, therefore, a really good idea for writers to think about holidays as more than a convenient theme for a collection or anthology. Holidays work on multiple levels: national, local, familial, personal. Different levels can conflict – the most common and familiar one is when a traditional family get-together conflicts with an individual character’s desire for a more personal celebration. There are also the conflicts that come when moving from one country to another, especially if a war develops between the old country and the new one, as happened twice to my German immigrant grandparents (WWI and WWII). There can even be difficulties that show up when moving from one part of the country to another. The Christmas snowman that was a family tradition in Michigan doesn’t work very well if you move to Florida.
Holidays reinforce people’s ties with each other, with their countries, with their cultures. They therefore provide lots of opportunity for both characterization and worldbuilding. The SF colony planet that celebrates Crash Landing Day automatically has an intriguing history, and the character whose great-grandmother died in the crash has an equally intriguing family history. The fantasy city that holds an annual Running of the Unicorns for good luck has a very different flavor from the one that raises an annual zombie on Longest Night to tell them what disasters they’ll face in the coming year, and the characters who participate – or refuse to participate – in each set of customs give very different impressions of their values and personalities.
Food traditions around holidays also make for good characterization and worldbuilding fodder. Snowflake-shaped sugar cookies baked annually at midsummer by a character living on a mostly-desert planet tell you a lot about where they came from and what they miss. The annual dragon-barbecue (in which the dragon does the barbecuing, rather than being the main course) says a lot about the relationship between humans and dragons, and possibly about the holiday they are apparently both celebrating.
Even a passing annoyance on the part of a character who cannot stand being offered one more cup of flaming fairy wine can tell readers something about both person and world, if only that there is some holiday that most people are participating in but which the character is doing his/her level best to ignore. Scrooge’s ascetic grumpiness stands out because of its contrast to the way everyone else is celebrating Christmas.
So what holidays do your characters celebrate? Does everyone else where they live celebrate the same ones, or the same way?
Holidays for me are times of isolation, mourning – and defiance. I don’t tend to put them in novels because they’ll derail the whole thing, although I’ll center short stories around them. (E.g., my shortest, https://kevinwadejohnson.blogspot.com/2020/12/christmas-alone.html)
Nevertheless, I’ll put a festival in the novel I’m drafting. My protagonist will find the whole concept bewildering. 🙂
Merry Christmas!
In addition to my WIP novel, I’m working on an anthology of holiday stories in my alt-history setting. With one exception they’re holidays that also are celebrated in our timeline, but the alt-versions have certain… twists.
In my D&D-inspired setting with halflings and goblins (and elves and dwarves) the two big holidays, at least among the halflings, are the winter and summer solstice ones. But I’m still vague on the details.
The alien world of my “human woman goes shopping” story ought to have some alien holidays that weirdly echo those on Earth, but I’m without inspiration as to what they are, and I don’t want to force it in case I get it wrong/have a better idea later.
My worst holiday-worldbuilding problem is with the world of my first novel (and two sequels). It’s a world where all the land is in the tropical zone, and there aren’t really any seasons (not even monsoon-style wet and dry seasons). World building is normally something I get “for free” but here I find myself even less able to world-build holidays than in the “human woman goes shopping” setting.
Despite the world having no real seasons, there might still be natural cycles that could be worth celebrating. There could be other reasons for synchronisation of important events.
Things like all the corals spawning at once during a specific full moon, so they have a much better chance of fertilisation, was what immediately came to mind for me on reading your comment.
Or irregularly occurring events, that recurr often enough to develop a pattern of reaction, like a whale carcass falling to the ocean floor triggers a hagfish feast. Or a giant tree toppling in the tropical jungle and letting sunlight reach the forest floor, for a few years – that might trigger a once in a generation region-wide long-lasting festival, like a ‘gap year’, maybe profiting from the rare berries that grow best in the sun.
If it’s got a good view of some mountains, a natural Stonehenge type of event, with the sun rising exactly in a gap in the mountains one day per solar cycle might give rise to a local ceremony in the area where the visual effect is strong.
And those are only some of the nature-based options, leaving all the historical and personal-development based options still to explore.
I hope you have fun doing so 🙂
One more cyclical natural event, in between the yearly and once per generation timescale: the collective blooming and die-down once per 7 years of the giant panda’s preferred food bamboo. I remember reading several years ago that this presents a problem, a danger of starvation for a threatened species, with not enough digestible alternatives available and reachable for the bears. IIRC they said that type of bamboo within the panda nature reserves are mostly clones, spread through root runners and dropped pieces, and that was why they all bloom near simultaneously.
If something like that caused the bears to come down the mountain and raid your vegetable plots every 7th year, gathering food for them and festively laying it out for them to eat without ruining your gardens might well develop into a regular propitiation/celebration festival (something similar is done for migrating cranes); maybe ending with a loud (fireworks?) banishment back to their mountain once the new bamboo has regrown – you don’t want them to keep hanging around indefinitely, looking for handouts.
As far as I’ve been able to garner from my research, the Hadza people of the Rift Valley have no holidays—and ony the barest nods toward religion. Their simplistic lifestyle and worldview intrigue me, and I’ve based some aspects of my WIP alien race on them, albeit loosely, with a lot of other compatible elements thrown in. What I mostly struggle with in building their culture is how it has been impacted by the crash-landing of an Earth ship; maybe their adopting a holiday or two would be interesting.
The half-finished sequel to my unpublished fantasy novel includes a holiday called Midwinter Moon, celebrated on the last full moon before the winter solstice. One of the major characters has recently been elevated from guardsman to governor of the city, so he’s suddenly attending much fancier Midwinter Moon parties than he did in his former life. This causes a problem when he fails to make the governor’s traditional toast for the occasion, because he had no idea it was a thing and nobody thought to tell him.
It’s fun to have stories that would logically pass through holidays — bog-standard contemporary holidays — and yet those days be of no relevance.
Sometimes it’s useful for indicating that time’s passing.
My agent has been sitting on _The Golden Road_ for most of a year (it was his idea to be a beta reader, but then he got locked down and super-busy). I’m going to email him on New Year’s Eve and when he next wakes up it’ll be 2022 and I can wish him a better year than the last few we’ve had.
But because TGR takes place in an alternate Early Middle Ages with an only slightly alternate Church in it, *and* because it’s populated by photophobic elves who can’t go out in daylight or full moonlight, I had to keep track not only of the Church calendar but of the phases of the moon.
But I didn’t have to invent any *new* holidays.