Yesterday was, of course, Independence Day in the United States. Or Fourth of July, or Treason Day, or Brexit 1776, or any of the zillion other monikers applied to the day. The occasion is also one of the most common secular holidays in the world, if not the most common; there are a lot of countries that sought and gained their independence from Great Britain.
The holiday, plus a long-running discussion about the ‘correct’ way to celebrate secular vs. religious holidays, sparked some musing about the nature of holidays and time-keeping in fiction.
If a story is set on Earth, the challenge is only to make sure the calendar is accurate for that time, place, and culture, and that the reader can understand it. Books with a heavy emphasis on Christmas probably don’t sell well in Saudi Arabia. Similarly, a piece of historical fiction might have to massage reality a bit when the question of ‘what year is it?’ crops up; most places used regnal years until fairly recently, and a new year could begin on January 1, Easter, September 29 (Michaelmas), or any number of other dates. Holidays aren’t always celebrated as enthusiastically in all places. Most countries don’t have a fortnight-long fireworks extravaganza that peters out sometime after the Fourth of July. Heck, a lot of American neighborhoods don’t do that; the climate won’t support it. The amount of attention a writer pays to holidays and calendars can be minimal; most readers will get it.
The real fun with fictional holidays comes when you’re writing fantasy or science fiction. What happens when the year is a different length? What happens when there is no December 25th, or July 4th, et cetera? The date of Easter is based on the lunar calendar, but there are no phases of the moon to count when you’re living on it. What happens in a colony that gains their independence from the United States; do they still celebrate the Fourth of July?
One way to handle it is to gloss over the whole thing. My only foray into anything remotely like science-fiction had essentially no calendar. Characters referred to days, weeks, and months passing, but the whole thing was remarkably unmoored in time, and there were no official holidays. It was passable, but more world-building in general might have improved that universe.
On the fantasy side, I was a rank beginner and had no idea how to handle things like holidays when I wrote the first two Garia books, and I ended up giving them a lot of Earth-like holidays to save time and thought. So they have solstices and equinoxes, and because it’s a fairly rural fantasy series, characters talk about harvest time, lambing season, and so on. I also gave a nod toward regnal years on official documents.
It basically works. If I was doing it over again (see also, why I’m struggling to write any more books in that series; it needs so much work) I might make up names for the months and draw attention to the confusion that might occur when the year begins in winter in one country and begins after harvest time in another.
That’s the plan for the fantasy mercenary series, which currently consists of one lonely book. In it, Gavril arrives in town on St. Denys’s Day, which the locals see as a great excuse for a drunken party. Everyone likes an excuse for a party, and by calling it a saint’s day, it gives a slightly medieval European flavor to the setting. I think there is actually a real St. Denys, probably known by a different spelling, but I’m reasonably sure that he’s not celebrated with drunken parties.
Between the saint’s days, references to seasonal tasks, borrowing obscure names for concepts like weeks and months, and a fair amount of making up things, I think I can create a calendar that makes sense in-universe and out of it.
How do you use holidays in your writing? How do your calendars differ from ours? Would you still celebrate Easter if you lived on the moon, and if yes, how would you know when to celebrate?
Mad Genius Club 
18 responses to “Holidays in Fiction”
The phase of Earth as seen from the Moon would be the reciprocal of the Moon’s phases as seen from Earth. Folks living on the Moon would see a New Earth when the Full Moon is seen here.
Most planets in David Weber’s Honorverse have a calendar that reflects their planetary year but they also keep track of Earth’s year.
So they might keep holidays by an Earth calendar and then have holidays by their planetary calendar.
But then, there’s Grayson.
The Graysons still use the Earth calendar/year for most purposes.
Which means they have Christmas on (roughly) the same date as Earth would keep it, thus it is very rare for them to have Christmas in the winter season. 😉
Even more interesting is that the Graysons didn’t reset their calendar for the Diaspora, which means they’re still using ‘our’ calendar, putting them in the year 4,000 and something.
Yep! 😀
For fantasy, there’s always “the founding/overthrow of the kingdom/empire/etc.”, religiously-based holidays (better invent the religions first), harvest festivals, planting festivals, and (most importantly) mischief/misrule holidays that nobody remembers where they came from (but everyone runs out of ale regularly anyway).
One shining advantage of giving your Europeanish high fantasy Christianity as a religion is that the holidays are baked in.
Okay, but unless the world was settled by Earth humans who followed Christianity, it’s hard to see how the faith would come into being there.
Well, for some of us, it would be surprising if an alternate Earth wouldn’t have a version of Christianity. 😉
You elide that. After all, it has all the other trappings of medieval Europe as no other place on earth did.
I have multiple settings and so multiple sets of holidays to worry about (or ignore). The alternate-history with stories mostly set in an alt-1950s has mostly real-world holidays with some er, alteration of emphasis or importance. Wikipedia has a list of the most important (by economic measures) holidays in the US that is a useful resource.
With the other settings, it’s in the back of my mind that there are holidays, but they mostly haven’t come up yet. The closest thing to a holiday story (so far) is set on an alien world where the aliens turned out to downplay wedding celebrations and instead play up celebrations of marriage anniversaries – in particular significant anniversaries which for them occur in cycles of 6 and 12 years. (And it’s only anniversaries that use the 6/12 year cycle, they’re base-10 for most things, with the 6 and 12 year thing being a cultural fossil.)
Well, you could use something like the Chinese Zodiac (12 year cycle) as the fossil.
In the Merchant books, each major deity has two or three feast days per year, usually seasonal. For example, the goddess of grain’s biggest feast in in the autumn, but she also has one in spring (planting). The economy is agricultural, so honoring lambing/calving, planting, harvests, midwinter (the Scavenger’s winter feast) and the like make perfect sense.
The Familiars are set in our world, just tweaked. the Hunter clans have a very solemn religious observance for the feast of St. Michael (Michaelmas), far more important than for other Christian groups.
In the Colplatschki books, there’s a group of (very) Reformed Jews in one of the stories. When extra-solar colonization began, a Council of Rabbis decided when how the dates for the High Holy Days and other things would be honored, based on the planetary year of the colony rather than by locking it to Earth’s calendar. Christianity has drifted so far from what is done one Earth that it’s become monotheistic. Christmas disappeared, and New Years is celebrated as the day to give gifts, in spring when new life begins. The neo-Traditionalists of the Shikhari universe adjust their calendar to allow for the differences between colony-world seasons and Earth schedule, with the High Holy Days landing on whatever the version of “early autumn” is for the world in question.
“Most countries don’t have a fortnight-long fireworks extravaganza that peters out sometime after the Fourth of July.”
Rural Italy used to be “fireworks for any important occasion, from Christmas to New Years, to town patron saint’s feastday” dunno if they still are.
Actual St. Denys: https://www.catholic-saints.info/patron-saints/saint-denis.htm
From my own works, the Jaiya setting had a late-summer Independence Day, vaguely mimicking the real-world Independence Day of India (August 15), with fireworks (vaguely mimicking US Independence Day). There’s a local festival which falls around the same time and figures in Marrying a Monster. This setting also had Fall Equinox (manly good works like repairing hospital buildings followed by a Passover-like religious meal, followed by PARTY! time), which figures in Seeking the Quantum Tree. Current WIP (Hunter Healer King) has a sort of Thanksgiving/Late Fall Festival analogue which falls on the full moon midway between Fall Equinox and Winter Solstice.
Calendars, holidays and day-of-week names tend to be things I enjoy researching and playing with, and don’t end up using in the actual story that much. It’s not really relevant for the readers of my Star Master books to know that the humans, like their ancient Egyptian forebears, only recognize three seasons in the standard calendar.
In ‘Texas at the Coronation’ I briefly mentioned the Congress Avenue Independence Day Parade. This would have been for Texas Independence Day, March 2nd. Texas also rarely misses a chance for a good party, so they celebrate many of their sub-culture’s holidays.
For what it’s worth, St. Denys (or Dennis, or Dionysius) is one of the “14 Holy Martyrs,” and is feted on either the 3d or 9th of October (depending on whether one uses a Roman or an Orthodox feast calendar). And the only Holidays I know of that aren’t for some sort of party are Ramadan, Yom Kippur, and Lent. (Data on St. Denys from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Denis).
So either the arrival was in autumn or in the southern hemisphere.
The one Invented Holiday I’ve used in my stories was a sort of leap-day called a Saturnalis for Titan, as its orbit of Saturn is 15 days, 22 hrs: every 192 days (12 “hexads” or orbits) a “free” day is inserted to reset the week, and it’s given the name of whichever weekday just finished. In the story, the characters got two Mondays in a row, though one of them is Christmas (according to the Earth’s calendar, UTC). If there’s a plausible way to convert to/from a known calendar, why not do so?
Good Friday. Which is not part of Lent but part of the Triduum, the shortest ecclesial season of the year.
I plead Calvinism: aside from Advent, Christmas, and Easter … and Reformation Sunday (that sabbath nearest to All Hallows Eve, to commemorate the Wittenburg Door event in 1517) … we Presbyterians get our Liturgical Calendars second-hand.
I once sang at what we in the choir jokingly called (far, far away from the minister and certain elders) a “high church Presbyterian” church. They actually followed the Episcopalian liturgical calendar, minus anything Marian. Nice folks who did lots of community service, great music, decent preaching.