With Valentine’s Day coming up (and the Chinese New Year falling on the same day), I’ve been thinking about all the different celebrations I know of and sorting them into different categories.
There are beginning-of-life celebrations, such as birthdays, naming days and baptisms. There are rite of passage celebrations, like graduation, wedding showers, housewarmings and baby showers. There are end of life rituals like wakes, and days to remember the dead (Memorial Day, Day of the Dead).
There are celebrations around religious and historical figures and events (feasts of the Saints, Christmas, Eid al-Adha, Fourth of July). One of these is the English (is celebrated in other parts of the UK as well?) Guy Fawkes’ Night, which celebrates the failure of a guy to blow up Parliament by shooting off fireworks and burning him in effigy. I’ve always found that one odd and amusing.
There are seasonal celebrations, and those that mark events of agricultural importance. Winter Solstice celebrations, harvest celebrations, fertility rites all come under this. I expect hunting societies have their own share of hunting-related rituals and celebrations, though none springs to mind immediately.
My sunless world of Quartz has a moon with a funky orbit. Twice a year (their definition of year), it stays in the sky for double the “normal” time and goes around the horizon in a belt-like orbit. The denizens call this Girddlesday and this is the time for contracts–marriages, treaties, trade agreements, and the like.. After the second Girddlesday of the year (let’s call this the Greater Girddlesday), the people mourn the disappearance of their primary celestial light source. When the moon rises again on New Year’s Day, they celebrate with performances, free food and drink, parades of large animals (very rare on that world).
If you could create a celebration, what would it be? What kind of celebrations would aliens on Jupiter have, or the folks on a colony ship that has been in space for generations? What would selkies or vampires or avian-humanoid hybrids celebrate?
Interesting that you should talk about this. I’m in the middle of brainstorming this for one of my cultures! It’s neat being in a country where you can see different things being celebrated, on an everyday level as well as the coming Chinese New Year.
I would love to hear what fun new celebration you come up with.
David and I were in Hong Kong for the Moon Festival, oh, eight years ago. We got engaged that night. 🙂
Well, the biggest celebration I ever created was the annual Festival of Fire for the Shuril (precedent to the Vas’heri). It was a day that basically celebrated who they were as a people and was the correct time for formalizing marriages and children who had manifested their “gifts.” (generally seven-year-olds)
Right now, I’m working on understanding Chirrith and writing Kett’r’s story in “Like Little Tongues of Power.” What I can already tell is that there is a celebration when a new future chieftain of a clan comes of age and is recognized as heir and that it is customary for the storyteller to tell a story over them to establish their future glory, etc. I haven’t found any seasonal celebrations yet. They all seem so personal, based on each individual reaching phases of life, etc. Still looking with great interest. I should pull out their calendar again and see what will give me the best fodder. Hmm…
Oh, I like the bit about a storyteller lauding their future glorious accomplishments. Is that seen as prophetic or hopeful? What if a storyteller hates the chieftain’s guts and tells of a short disastrous reign?
It’s actually a part of the magic system. The one rule that only the storytellers know is that if the one it’s spoken over doesn’t BELIEVE it, it has no power. But if the chieftain believes that what they say will happen, it will to an extent. It’s not like literal blow for blow prophesy, but it sets the tone and type of things that will happen.
If a short, disastrous reign was told over the future chieftain, the poor guy would be initially horrified, his father would probably kill the storyteller, and they would spend the next however many years fighting to prevent what to them would be just about set in stone. Because they believed, it the reign would be short, but the disaster may not come to pass because they fought against it.
Make sense?
Ah! I’ve been waiting for the wordbearers to show up and one of them has been hiding right under my nose! I never know the rules are applied until I meet someone applying them. Character is story for me.
That would make an interesting short story come to think of it.
:silencing the muse before it gets carried away:
Friday Fun, while fun, is dangerous. LOL 🙂
And here I came up with two more friday funs while trying to fall asleep last night. Good thing Friday only comes around once a week. 😉