You’re in the midst of worldbuilding, and you’ve really got a good grip on your people, their culture, their history, their geography and their religion. But you’re looking to make it more real, and one element to that equation is holidays. This holiday creation guide for worldbuilders will help you think deeper and be more original about the holidays in your world. This article will explore all the facets and obstacles you might encounter when developing holidays for the people of your world. This detailed guide will provide a lot of information on how to get inspired, suit your culture and even explore special situations like post-apocalyptic holidays, and holidays in space and intergalactic situations.

Why Your World Needs Holidays

Beyond the fact that holidays are fun to dream up, they’re also an excuse for a day off, a celebration, a feast, or a way to better expound upon your culture.

Recently, I was working on a short story that took place in a fictional world. The plot centered around the preparation and celebration of a feast. Then it hit me, what are they going to celebrate? It wasn’t for a wedding, and I didn’t want to be ambiguous about it. What this amounted to is that my people needed an excuse to celebrate, and I had to dream up that excuse.

Think about what holidays offer us: a reason to gather in fellowship with family and friends, a reason to go on a date, a reason to remember those loved and lost, a reason to rest, a reason to drink and a reason to have a mattress sale. Now think of some of your major holiday experiences and some of the incredible, chance things that happened on those occasions. Maybe you met your soulmate on New Years Eve, maybe Christmas was the time you got your puppy and the lifelong relationship that came with. Maybe it was Cinco de Mayo where you decided to get really authentic and venture south of the Rio, and on that adventure that your life completely changed.

We need holidays. They do so much for us, and your people need them too.

Inspiration

Obviously, the first place we all tend to draw inspiration is from the holidays we know and how they’re celebrated. We may even extend special, unique family traditions we grew up with into the world we’ve created. After all, those traditions, as quirky as they might have been are so dear to us, we can’t help but evangelize our world.

Outside of personal experience, holiday crafting might be your favorite thing, and you have  a gift for coming up with random holidays and the details about how their celebrated. If this is you, way to go. Keep up with it because some of the most interesting things are conceived this way.

If holiday creation is not quite a gift, and maybe you want to come up with something original, the best advice is to let your world craft their own holidays for you.

Consider for a moment current, mainstream holidays we celebrate. They’re rooted in religion, history, war, social issues, etc. Now look at your own world.

Creating Religious Holidays for Your world

Think about your world’s primary religion. Perhaps there are many, so focus on a region and explore the milestones in that culture’s belief system. Would they celebrate the creation of the world – why not have them celebrate the moment your mind made up their land! Was there a holy person or prophet or mage who is so famous, that the people of the land revere this person for all time? Make it a feast. Is there a God or Goddess who the people are most devoted to? Perhaps there is a day in which that deity delivered them from some great threat. That’s a chance for your people to celebrate the remembrance of that date.

Sacrifice and atonement tend to play a huge role in religion. Perhaps you already have a sacrificial time of year, with just a little more development, that period could be a major holiday for your people.

What if there is no religion? Or what if the people of your world believe more in philosophical and metaphysical things? Meaning and fateful coincidences could still be celebrated with spirit. For example, maybe there is a world that finds significant meaning behind the elements, there is no reason not to celebrate. It only adds deeper meaning to those elements and cultivates greater culture in your world.

Leader Based Holidays

Leaders such as kings and queens and heroes are often celebrated. In the US, we have Presidents Day. It’s not a hugely popular holiday, but it’s still noted. Maybe in your world, the people value their monarchs with more esteem. Or perhaps the monarch values him or herself a little highly, so highly that there is a feast each year to celebrate their coronation or birth.

What about noteworthy heroes? Just like a god delivering a peoples from certain death, perhaps the people of your world have a legendary person who did the same thing, or united clans or established some kind of characteristic culture.

How important a holiday based on a leader is will depend on your world. If your world emphasizes religion more, then these might be lesser holidays, if they’re even holidays at all. If your world lacks theism, then celebrating people might be a nice way to establish some holidays.

Tragedy and Triumph Based Holidays

The idea of freedom is a core value for many countries. So important is this idea, people will lay down their lives to protect it, and remember those forefathers who laid down their lives to protect it. As a result, days of remembrance have made their marks on calendars. Some are lesser holidays, while others are extremely important (Independence Day in the United States).

Realistically, the celebration and remembrance of important wars  – their bittersweet victories should also be celebrated or at least honorably mentioned. Wars, revolts, stands against tyrants that made a nation in your world great are all worth consideration.

Workers’ and Social Based Holidays

Depending on your world, this type of occasion might be less important or not really have any place at all. For others, this might be a great idea generator. Workers’ type holidays would be ones that acknowledge the labor of the people, and allow them much needed rest and togetherness with family. In the US, there is Labor Day. A day when there’s no school, all the banks are closed and if you’re lucky, you’re off work too. The nice thing is that there’s no god to worship or war to remember – or no need to feel guilty for hardly remembering. No, this is just a nice day off to grill and be with family.

If the people of your land work hard, or are ruled by a tyrant who would like to think herself occasionally merciful, this could be a fun holiday. You could get a little clever and tie in some ironic absurdities, like the amount of labor required in order to celebrate in the first place.

Social holidays are those that celebrate social progress. Perhaps a race of people in your land was looked down on as lower peoples, but through the sacrifice and unity of voices among them, they were able to break the ceiling and make real change happen. Forever more, they celebrate those who paved the road for a happier future.

Seasonal Holidays

So many cultures celebrate seasonality, and it would be realistic for the people of your world to celebrate in the same fashion. A lot of important events rotate around the seasons: harvest, planting, fertility, hunting, hibernation. They mark our journey in life, year after year, and allow us to reflect on life and life changes.

How your people celebrate seasonality is up to you. It could be as simple as festivals for each season, allowing you to expand on the special seasons in your world. Or these holidays could be more complex, tying in cultural values with the seasons. Spring, for instance, being the season of birth, and winter the season of death. Maybe the people of your world have opposite analogies, which makes celebrating even more interesting.

Even if your world is one with more than the traditional four, or less than the traditional four, integrating seasonal celebration is a great way to enlighten people about your world’s culture.

Drawing Inspiration from Land and Culture

Depending on the culture of your people, seasons and religion might not be as important as geographical landmarks. If your people are fed by a major river or perhaps a holy tree, it would be interesting to have a holiday dedicated to the richness it provides. Of course, you can always marry different ideas into this one. For example, the river might seasonally run one way, and run the opposite upon another season or decade. As a result, planting habits and transportation might change dramatically.

Acknowledging your people’s culture and making sure the holidays you craft suit them is also important. A warrior culture might not value worker holidays and time off. Instead, celebrating the most notable heroes and delivering gods are going to be far more fitting. Likewise, an undisturbed farming nation is unlikely to celebrate champions in war. Instead, seasonal holidays might be of more importance. Even celebrating the wisdom of their elderly and having holidays devoted to family values and togetherness will seem much more realistic.

When your world has several culture groups, it will become a lot more fun choosing holidays that really highlight the best of each people group.

Marketability

Everyone has different reasons for worldbuilding. For some, it’s an escape. It’s a sacred space for you and you alone. Writers and game developers, however, might intend to share their world. If you fall under the second category, then we have to pull out that dreaded word: marketability. You have an audience and that means the holidays are not just for you and your people, but for anyone else looking in. So it doesn’t hurt to factor in some analogous holidays, especially ones that parallel Christmas and Halloween.

Christmas has become more than a spiritual holiday. It’s about a month-long way of life. With Christmas and the joy it brings being much loved, it’s hard to leave out a version of this in your own world. So if you intend to produce something you want to sell, you might want to consider a holiday fashioned similarly to Christmas. Maybe it’s as simple as a winter feast with similar ideals and ways of celebrating. Maybe it’s a little more complex – either way, keep the culture of giving, good music, cinnamon fruit drinks and the scent of pine as elements of this type of holiday.

Halloween is also a beloved holiday. It plays on our fears and our curiosity of the unknown. The masquerading part of Halloween also appeals to our need to escape ourselves, and it being culturally acceptable to do so. With these attributes being so prized in our reality, it’s advisable to pull from those elements into what you’re creating.

Devising Holidays for Culture

It was mentioned earlier in this article that the holidays you create need to fit your culture. But your world likely has several cultures and regions that merge and interact. And these interactions might also come to a head.

If you’re trying to fabricate realistic holidays and patterns of celebration, you’ll want to imagine what would happen when one people group invades another. What will happen to the holidays and how they’re celebrated? Do they merge? Will the people accept the new holiday – do they even have a choice? How do conquering holy people respond when the conquered mass continues in their old belief system and rituals?

Historically, in these situations, it’s the rich that adopt the new traditions first. By doing so, they set the standard. However, the poor lay people will hold to the old ways. Generation after generation, the merging of the two occurs. Information is lost or it evolves, until a final true holiday surfaces.

This exercise in challenging your world will lead you into new perspectives on celebrations. Your world has the power to pave all of this if you only ask it to.

On that same note, beyond cultural clashes, your world likely has different beings and because of their unique makeup, they’re going to celebrate and value very different things. Do elves and humans celebrate in harmony? Was it always like that? Or maybe one of your beings hunts the other. This could create holiday duality in which one is celebrating with feast, and the other, the hunted, is remembering their dead. Just as there is a cultural clash, your could consider the species clash and cross interactions when it comes to holidays.

How Your Worldbuilded Holidays Are Celebrated

So you’ve asked of your world, and your world provided. Now you have a well gridded calendar (mental or physical), noting primary holidays and lesser holidays. Now the fun is determining how these holidays are celebrated.

The how is really at the heart of celebration. Think of Christmas and everything that adds to the feeling of the season. A feast is a good beginning, but some other things you might want to ask yourself are:

• What are the rituals of your holiday?
• How long is the holiday (just a day, or a week, or a month)?
• If your holiday is longer than a day, does it build up? Is there a most important day, and how does that look?
• How does religion influence how your holiday is celebrated?
• What contributes to anxiety of the celebration?
• What food is traditionally served?
• What traditions take place?
• How do people decorate to symbolize the holiday?
• Are there gifts exchanged?
• Are their traditional games?
• Are there people who may not partake in these holidays?
• How does a celebration look for the rich and how does it look for the poor?
• If two races or species celebrate the same holiday, do they celebrate it in the same way? How is it different?
• How do you create the feel of the holiday when the feel isn’t there? Christmas, for example, is celebrated all over the world, and is regarded as a winter holiday. So how do people who live in warm climates celebrate the season?

After studying your world, more ideas will surface to help some of your major holidays become grand celebrations.

Space, Sci-Fi and Intergalactic Situations for Worldbuilding Holidays

Remember, people need holidays. They need excuses to celebrate together, take it easy and drink, even in space. But space presents some unique hurdles, and those hurdles will also depend on the situation.

A ship whose journey to a new planet will take several lifetimes, might have a cultural shift and therefore a change in celebration. How would being so far from Earth impact the way people celebrate some of Earth’s major holidays? Do they still celebrate? With the last of humanity in its belly, value based holidays to help boost moral might be more important than some of the holidays of old.

In intergalactic situations, you’re not only playing with several cultures, but several worlds. There are branching cultures with overlapping holidays. In a Reddit post asking Redditors to post about their intergalactic holidays, one response humorously highlighted a real obstacle an intergalactic station might encounter:

Determining a standard calendar of holidays that satisfies an infinite seeming amount of cultures would be extremely necessary. Although, it would be fun to imagine the absurdity of only having one day a year where federal staff does work.

Pilgrimages involved in holidays might pose an interesting obstacle for a space setting. In these cases, people aren’t hopping on planes or traveling by car to get somewhere. They’re traveling light years to a location. If anything, the obstacles you challenge yourself with, will cultivate important plots and add more character to your creation.

While we don’t think seasonality plays a huge role on holiday celebration because most can be celebrated independently. Seasonality creates ambiance and ambience helps contribute to the feel of the celebration. In space, there is no seasonality, unless it’s artificially created. There’s no change in day or night, either. This aspect shouldn’t be ignored when you start to describe your holidays. Instead, it’s worthwhile to comment on the obstacles it causes or to elaborate on how people have adapted to the lack of seasonality and feel of the holiday.

Again, challenge your world and the space it takes place, and you will come up with interesting conflicts and solutions.

Holidays in a Post-Apocalyptic Setting

Just as space can present celebratory challenges, a post-apocalyptic world might also have interesting spins on how holidays are celebrated. It’s important to keep that in mind too because the destruction of a culture means a loss in information, which leads to a change in tradition and values.

As you build your world, remembering that holidays are essential, you’ll have to begin with what stays and what goes. For those of you writing, you might want to think heavily about keeping Christmas and Halloween like holidays.

Once you have a mental calendar stewing, you’ll want to go back to the how step in holiday crafting. In a post apocalyptic world, however, you might want to ask yourself other important questions. For example, is the holiday celebrated wrong due to a lack of information and history? Is the holiday even more sacred because of what happened to humanity or to a specific race? Is the holiday outlawed and celebrated in secret?

The key thing to remember in all of this is that holidays are essential, and your world is jam-packed with the information to create them. By exploring certain obstacles, these prominent holidays will only add to the overall culture you’ve created.

One final note on holiday creation is holiday naming. Naming anything in worldbuilding can become a point of frustration. But it doesn’t have to be. Take a look at our naming article. While it doesn’t talk specifically about holidays, you can apply the same systems to help generate meaningful names for celebrations.