What Is a Festival? Days Set Apart and What Setting Them Apart Does
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Marking particular days as different from ordinary days is close to universal, and the differences imposed are consistent across traditions. The practice structures the year, enforces rest and remembers events, and the three purposes pull against each other.
What is done differently
A day set apart is marked by prescribed departures from ordinary practice and the departures recur across traditions. Work is suspended or restricted, which is the most consequential feature and the one with the widest social effect. Food is different, whether by feasting, by fasting or by specific prescribed dishes, and both directions mark the day equally effectively. Assembly is required or expected, which converts a private observance into a collective one. Clothing changes. Specific actions are performed that are done at no other time, and specific actions are forbidden. A narrative is recited or enacted, connecting the day to whatever it commemorates. The combination makes the day unmistakably distinct, which is the point, since a day marked only by intention is indistinguishable from an ordinary one.
What the days commemorate
The occasions cluster into recognisable categories:
- •Agricultural and seasonal turning points, which are the oldest layer and underlie many later religious festivals
- •Historical events, particularly deliverance, foundation and catastrophe
- •Figures, marking births, deaths and episodes in the lives of significant people
- •Cosmic events, including solstices, new moons and the new year however it is reckoned
- •Life transitions performed collectively, including harvest, planting and the start of a term or season
- •Days of penitence and mourning, which are as structurally important as days of celebration
The rest argument
The requirement to stop working is the feature with the largest social consequence and it has been fought over accordingly. A prescribed day of rest applying to everyone, including servants, labourers and animals, is a substantial protection where no other exists, and the earliest formulations state that inclusion explicitly. Enforcement made it effective, since a rest day one employer observes and another ignores disadvantages whoever observes it, which is why the requirement was backed by religious and then legal sanction. The secularisation of that protection into labour law is a direct descendant, and the erosion of common non-working days through liberalised trading and shift work has removed something that was not only religious, since a day when most people are free is qualitatively different from an equivalent number of days taken separately.
Fixing the dates
Deciding when a festival falls is a technical problem that traditions have solved in different ways with visible consequences. Fixed dates in a solar calendar are simplest and drift against the seasons only slowly. Dates tied to a lunar month move against a solar year, which is why several major festivals shift by weeks from year to year and why calendars reconciling the two need intercalated months. Dates tied to an event that must be calculated, including the spring equinox combined with a lunar phase, require computation and have caused disputes about the correct method. Dates tied to observation, including the sighting of a new moon, depend on weather and on location, which means neighbouring communities can observe the same festival on different days, and the question of whether to use observation or calculation has been argued within several traditions for centuries.
How they change
Festivals are remarkably durable and their content is remarkably mutable, which is a combination worth noticing. Dates persist across religious change, with new observances placed on existing dates and absorbing their practices, which is documented extensively for the winter and spring festivals of Europe and which produced the mixture of elements visible in them. Practices migrate between traditions and between the religious and the commercial, with several major festivals now substantially structured by retail cycles. Meanings are reinterpreted while the observance continues, so a day kept for one reason is kept for another a century later by the same families. And new festivals are established constantly, by states, by movements and by communities, using exactly the same devices of prescribed difference that the old ones use, which indicates the mechanism is general rather than religious.
The takeaway
Suspended work, different food, required assembly, changed clothing and a recited narrative mark a day as distinct, and a day marked only by intention is not distinct at all. The rest requirement applied to everyone including servants, which is a protection later inherited by labour law. Dates persist across religious change while their content is replaced, which is why old festivals contain mixed elements.