Topic: Holidays and non-earth calendars

[dutch206]

I've been thinking about something since reading HARP SF this week.  Every major culture and religion on Earth has its own calendar.  Many also have holidays whose dates are determined by astrological events in the skies as seen from earth.  (ie. Chinese New Year, Carnivale, Easter, Passover, Eid al Fitr, etc....)

How do you make sense of this if you no longer live on Earth?  Mars, for instance, has a year of 668 days.  (And yes, several people have already invented Martian Calendars, believe it or not.)  Let's say you've moved to this new world.  Your rituals and traditions will be the only thing you have to remind you of home, and to pass on your culture.

Any ideas?  I was just thinking of setting aside arbitrary "Cultural Celebration Days".

[GrumpyOldFart]

An obvious reason for seasonal holidays is celebrating when the weather's likely to be good enough to justify going out in it to work, and celebrating again when the weather shuts you back indoors. In a binary star system where their interaction interferes noticeably with the climate/habitability of the system's inhabited planet(s), you might have a large crop of religious holidays when "the destruction" is due, and another after it's safely past. On the other hand, when the other star disturbs orbits might be when the good things happen, rather than the bad ones.

Whether holidays are based on astronomical events not only depends on whether the planets has moons and how many, but whether the inhabitants can see the sky at all. What's the typical cloud cover like? Are the local sapients even surface dwellers? If not, then none of the factors I've noted apply, do they?

 

[dutch206]

Holiday celebrations make a good backdrop for adventures, though.  It provides a reason for lots of plot elements to be going on at once.  I like to plan these things out in advance.

[GrumpyOldFart]

Sure. But beyond a very general discussion of hypotheticals, you can't say much about holidays based on planetary conditions until you have a set of planetary conditions to apply them to. There are too many possible variables.

[markc]

Sure. But beyond a very general discussion of hypotheticals, you can't say much about holidays based on planetary conditions until you have a set of planetary conditions to apply them to. There are too many possible variables.

+1
MDC

[Thom @ ICE]

The way I originally read Dutch's question (and Dutch can feel free to comment on my interpretation) was -

Earth based individuals relocate to a planet which has 668 days per year, instead of 365. How would they handle holidays?

Two ways that I see -
1 - Lock Down to the Earth Calendar
Establish the same calendar as Earth (allowing the day cycle to be local), but the monthly and annual calendars to be Earth based.  This way even though it may seem to locals like you are celebrating your Earth holidays twice per year (in year 1 you celebrate Christmas on day 358, but in year 2 you celebrate it on day 48 and then again on day 406).  This is likely to annoy locals, but would be used if there is still considerable communication back to Earth.

2 - Adapt the calendar to Local Annual Calendar
Insert a 25 day month between every Earth Calendar month, and then add 3 extra calendar days at appropriate points in the year related to local astronomical conditions.  Christmas would then still occur on December 25, but instead of being day 358 in the calendar, it becomes day 661.

Keep in mind that unless you pick a single universal representation of time -
ex: 1 "Earth Year" = 8,760 hours = 525,600 minutes = 31,536,000 seconds
Any discussion of time, ages, dates, etc. becomes extremely confusing to individuals from different planets/solar systems.

[GrumpyOldFart]

If there is such a thing as a "Galactic Time Standard", it would probably be based on spectroscopic frequencies of elements or some such, as anything more local than that is subject to change from stellar system to stellar system.

That said, pretty much any spacefaring race must have the concepts of duration and interval, so even if they personally don't care about time, their spacecraft certainly keep track of it. They have to.

[Marc R]

Or just based on the time keeping and calendar of the people with the most guns, or money. . ."Why do you keep these 24 hour days on a planet with 28.7 hours?" "Because we're part of the Terran empire!"