Holidays and festivals

About holidays and festivals

Holidays and festivals gathers the symbols of the calendar’s feasts, a section for each holiday, and follows every symbol back to the earliest record the sources give. There are eight sections so far, from Halloween at the end of October to Kwanzaa at the turn of the year and the Lunar New Year in January or February.

Halloween symbols are the jack-o’-lanterns, soul cakes, black cats and bonfires of 31 October. Where Halloween came from is disputed. Jack Santino, in a lecture at the Library of Congress in 1982, traced it to “an ancient, pre-Christian Celtic festival of the dead”; the historian Lisa Bitel answers that “Samhain is Irish. Halloween isn’t.” Día de Muertos, “a related but different holiday” in the Library of Congress’s words, is a tradition of its own, and these pages don’t fold it into Halloween.

Thanksgiving symbols are the turkey, the cornucopia, the pumpkin pie and the rest of the American table on the fourth Thursday of November. The one eyewitness account of the 1621 harvest at Plymouth names only fowl and five deer. Since 1970, Native Americans have gathered in Plymouth on Thanksgiving Day for a National Day of Mourning.

Day of the Dead symbols are the ofrenda, the cempasúchil and the calaveras of Día de Muertos, kept in Mexico on 1 and 2 November. UNESCO inscribed the “Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead” on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008.

Diwali symbols are the lamps, rangoli and sweets of the festival of lights in October or November. Hindus, Jains and Sikhs keep it, each for reasons of their own; for Sikhs, the BBC writes, it celebrates the release of the sixth guru, Guru Hargobind, from prison in 1619.

Hanukkah symbols are the dreidel, the gelt and the fried foods of the eight-day Jewish festival that begins on 25 Kislev. It remembers the Maccabees’ rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem, told in the first book of Maccabees.

Christmas symbols are the nativity scene, the tree, holly and mistletoe, St Nicholas and Krampus. The Gospels give no date for the birth of Jesus, Andrew McGowan points out, and how 25 December came to be chosen is still argued over.

Kwanzaa symbols are the kinara, the seven candles and the seven principles of the week-long celebration of African heritage kept from 26 December to 1 January, in the words of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Britannica records that Maulana Karenga devised both the name and the celebration in 1966.

Lunar New Year symbols are the red envelopes, the upside-down fu, the lion dance, lanterns and firecrackers that begin the year of the lunar calendar. By the Hong Kong Observatory’s calendar the next one, the Year of the Goat, begins on 6 February 2027.

Stories written down later

Much of what people repeat about Halloween and Thanksgiving was first written down long after the events it describes. Alexander Young’s footnote of 1841 named the 1621 harvest “the first Thanksgiving”. The idea that Samhain began the Celtic year, Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress writes, “only arose in the late nineteenth century”.

Where Halloween and Thanksgiving meet

They meet in the pumpkin. Carved turnip lanterns were an Irish Halloween custom, and the National Museum of Ireland calls the pumpkin jack-o’-lantern an American development of it. In 1844 the New England poet John Greenleaf Whittier remembered carving “wild, ugly faces” in pumpkins as a boy, in a poem in praise of Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.