An
Introduction To Britain's Traditional Festival Year
It
also can be used to solve the biggest problem in calendar creation, the
reconciling of solar units (years) and lunar units (months, from 'moons').
It's thought that lunar calendars are older than solar, offering smaller
and thus more important time-keeping units (of 28 days). The solar year
can be tracked via a lunar calendar - provided a simple correction is
made, of one day. That is, four 90-day solar quarters plus 4 'intercalary'
festival days totals only 364 days. This roughly reconciles the solar
calendar with the older lunar calendar in that 364 days is thirteen lunar
months [13 x 28= 364], leaving a one-day discrepancy with the true solar
year of 365.25 days. This is the background to the old legal term sometimes
heard in fairy-tales, “a year and a day” to denote a complete
'luni-solar' calendar year of 365 days. The left-over '.25' is accommodated
by making every fourth year a 'leap' year, adding (as the children's rhyme
reminds us) an extra, 29th day in February, a device which prevents the
calendar gradually going out of alignment with nature.In the luni-solar calendar, the two solstices (literally “sun standing still” -- after which either days or nights take their turn to start to become shorter again), and the two equinoxes (“equal night,” i.e. when days and nights are of equal length) form the mid- or turning point of each season. The start and end of each seasonal quarter (known as cross-quarter days) were also marked with a traditional festival, often lasting a week or so in pre-Industrial times. The year thus had 8 calendric divisions, with each season commemorated at its start, middle, and end. Though reduced in scale, these 8 festivals are often still celebrated today, especially in the country districts where folk customs tend to survive best.
The mid-point
of Spring, on 21 March, is the Spring Equinox, meaning
the time when days are as long as nights (equi-nox or "equal night").
Though often announced today by weather forecasters as the "first
day of spring," there is today no surviving festival, it having been
no doubt eclipsed by its proximity to the major, double Christian holiday
(“holy day”) of Easter, which has retained its status as a
week-long break. 
Easter
officially falls on the Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring
Equinox. It is thus reckoned on a Christian, lunar, and solar
basis, reconciling three different calendric elements. It is preceded
and enhanced by Lent, from the Anglo-Saxon to “lengthen,”
a period of 40 days fasting at winter's end to mark the lengthening of
the day until it becomes longer than night. (The word “carnival”
which today has come to mean a parade, may be from the Latin “Carne,
vale” or “Meat, Farewell” - referring to the feast
before or after which one abstains from meat for a while.) Easter is named
after Eostre, the Saxon goddess of dawn. Easter was the start
of the Christian year till 1752 when the Gregorian calendar was adopted.
Eostre's pet animal was the hare (also sacred to the Celts) which like
the rabbit was a symbol of fertility and at this time of year runs about
madly fighting -- as in the expression “Mad as a March hare.”
There were no rabbits in Britain at this time, only hares, but the Spring
hare has now been commercialised as the Easter Bunny. The sign of Easter
is the cross with four equal arms which is found on the Hot Cross Bun
sold in the shops around Easter.
Summer
properly starts with May Day, now sometimes confusingly
referred to in Britain as the Spring Bank Holiday but once the Celtic festival of
Beltane, “Beautiful Flame.” This was the time of
the cattle drive to summer pasture (a practise known technically as transhumance).
For luck, the cattle were led out through the smoke of protective bonfires.
It would also be about time for final planting of late crops. There was
a pageant led by the chosen local May Queen and her consort the Green
Man, and couples would dance around the May-Pole and go off a-maying,
collecting May garlands. The Church conducted marriages at this time and
imposed its own festival of Whitsuntide, when people
set off on pilgrimages, perhaps to mark the end of the May celebrations,
which were sometimes lengthy.
This
could also mark the start of harvest time, while Summer's end in the first
week of August could mark the end of harvest. This was once the Celtic
festival of Lugnasagh, of Lugh the god of Light, Christianised
as Lammastide, which involved the baking and giving of
small bread loaves made from the harvest grain. Locally, after the harvest
was safely gathered, there was a celebration sometime in August, known
as the Harvest Home, a party or dance. (One is portrayed in Hardy's 1874
novel Far From The Madding Crowd.) A few pagan “thanksgiving”
country practices have survived here such as making a “corn dolly”
from the last corn sheaf harvested as a tribute to the Corn Goddess. These
can sometimes still be seen hanging on the walls in country inns, and
more elaborate hand-crafted effigies made from cane or wicker are also
sometimes sold in country crafts shops.
The start of Autumn is properly the first week in August, marked by Lughnasah
or Lammastide. However to align it with the modern school term, (when
the children were no longer available to help fulltime on the farm), the
August festival has been moved to the end of the month, as the August
Bank Holiday weekend. It thus now marks the end of summer for families,
just before the children return to school. The seasonal mid-point comes
on 21-22 September, the Autumn Equinox, which was displaced
a week (to the 29th) on the Church calendar as the day of prayer to St
Michael the Archangel, standing in for the old sun god representing the
power of light over dark. In the Celtic era, Autumn ended in the first
week of November with the festival of Samhain
[the "mh" is pronounced as "v"] which marked the end of Celtic year. This was the “Witches Sabbath”
when the spirits of the dead were said to come out of their graves, and
this ghoulish fright-night aspect is still part of modern Hallowe'en
(from “Hallowed evening”) on 31 October, i.e. the
eve of 1st November. (The Celts counted by nights and hence always celebrated
the evening before the festival day.) It was Christianised as All Souls
Day. Clocks are usually put back an hour at this time of year, marking
the end of British Summer Time.
The
mid-point (21/22 December) of Midwinter's Day i.e. the
Winter Solstice, is marked by the most famous of ancient festivals, Christmas
(24/25 December). Officially it is a Christian festival, the “Christ
Mass,” adopted by the Church from AD 600. However, all pre-Christian
societies seem to have celebrated a midwinter feast at this time to help
than get through the darkest days of the year when their gods of light
were at their weakest. The Romans themselves celebrated a Saturnalia,
a Feast of Saturn the Lord Of Time. This was also the festival of the
Lord Of Misrule, when the normal social order was inverted. and slave-owners
served a dinner and drinks to their servants, a custom still practised
by the British Army. The other name of the old Roman festival, also celebrated
in Britain during the Roman Era, spells out the real appeal of a midwinter
feast: Dies Natalis Invicta Solis, the Birthday Of The Undefeated
Sun, for after the Winter Solstice on 21/22 December, days begin to lengthen
again.
The
pre-Christmas “count-down” four-week period is known as Advent.
Although the custom is no longer observed as much in Britain as elsewhere
in Europe, evergreen Advent Wreaths sometimes appear in shop or house
windows, and children are sometimes given Advent Calendars. A flowering
sprig of the Glastonbury Thorn tree (supposedly a token of the founding
of Britain's first Christian church in the 1st Century AD) is also sent
to the Queen and placed on the Royal dinner table. The mistletoe sprig,
traditionally placed over a doorway by a woman (the custom that you may
kiss her when she stands under it is probably modern), was connected with
Celtic fertility rites conducted at this time so that children would be
born in Summer, as the time of plenty. Santa Claus, the children-oriented
corruption of St Nicholas, alias Old Father Christmas, is a Christian
take-over of an ancient magical pagan figure, a bringer of presents for
the children in the midwinter feast of plenty. His sleigh and reindeer
indicate he was of Scandinavian origin.
The
celebrations end with New Year's Eve. In Scotland, this
is called Hogmanay (a word of unknown meaning; Og
in Celtic means ancient, timeless). At Hogmanay is the strange custom
of First Foot, where it is thought good luck for a dark man to enter at
midnight bearing a simple gift -- which some argue commemorates the annual
renewal of the peace treaty between the fair-haired Celtic settlers and
the darker aboriginal people at Britain.
In 1752 in Britain the old Julian Calendar created by Julius Caesar was
adjusted by skipping 11 days as its in-built inaccuracy meant it had been
slowly slipping out of sync with the true luni-solar calendar. However
country folk often still insisted on commemorating festivals every 365
days exactly, so that after 1752 there were also 'Old' versions of festivals
being celebrated 11 days behind the rest of the country. On Old
Twelfth Night, it was and is customary to go wassailing,
singing and pouring cider on the apple trees to encourage a good crop
next spring - an obvious pagan fertility rite which has survived from
pre-Christian times. 