Sunday, March 31, 2024

Holidays

     Today is Easter, and I'd like to share appropriate wishes to all my observing Christian friends.  Many of the more-secular celebrate this day, too, at least as far as big family dinners, candy baskets and Easter Egg hunts.

     Spring 2024 is a real pile-up of holidays; Easter falls roughly two-thirds of the way through Ramadan* this year and we're about a few weeks away from the beginning of Passover.  Each of these religious holidays is a "movable feast," rather than a fixed calendar date.  There are other commemorations, too: today is Cesar Chavez day, if you'd like to get irked about a labor organizer, and it's International Transgender Day of Visibility, for those who would prefer a more recent culture-war item to gripe about.  It's also the day the Dali Lama reached the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery outside Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1959 and the PRC is still annoyed about that.

     What all these events have in common is that here in the U.S., celebrating or complaining about them is not compulsory.  Pick and choose, and let your fellow citizens do the same.  It's Springtime and flowers are sprouting, and if you can't find something to be happy about this time of year, you probably never will.

     I guess rage is fun, but I can assure you happiness is a hell of a lot better for your blood pressure and digestion, and makes you nicer to have around.  Me, I'm not going to worry; it's a great big world and it's full of choices.
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* Determined by a Lunar calendar, Ramadan steps backwards through the solar calendar, resulting in interesting effects: the holiday appears twice in 2030.
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3 comments:

  1. Jeffrey SmithMarch 31, 2024 at 11:09 PM

    Technical correction:
    Passover starts three weeks from tomorrow (Monday) night.
    And it does have a fixed date; just that the date is set by a system that's not the system used by general society. (Same applies to Ramadan.) But I've yet to understand the system for Easter (compounded by Eastern Orthodox using their own system).

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  2. Roberta XApril 1, 2024 at 7:38 AM

    I stand corrected and have edited the post.

    "A fixed calendar date," can be taken to imply the civil, secular calendar in wide use. Muslims and Jews have their own religious calendars, as do the Eastern Orthodox churches; Japan is still presumably counting some things by the Imperial calendar, and so on.

    The effect is to make Easter, Passover and Ramadan wander around the workaday calendar according to their own rules. (And Orthodox Pascha's over a month away, too.)

    You can pick those nits all you like but there's plenty more where they came from and a short item for a blog hasn't got space to round 'em all up and herd them off to Dodge City.

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  3. TamApril 1, 2024 at 9:43 AM

    Jeffrey Smith,

    "But I've yet to understand the system for Easter..."

    Western/Catholic Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Equinox on the Gregorian Calendar.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter

    ReplyDelete

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