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A Festive Occasion

On the plane of Crossroads, there is no concept of Christmas or any other winter holiday. However, most still hold end of the year festivities.

And at the Theorum Magistrum, the faculty throws a party in anticipation of the coming year. This year, it looks like poor Enigma was tasked with putting up the lights and decorations, though maybe someone of his intellect was better left in planning and logistics.

A piece from Marsel-Defender from December of 2019.

One of the most fascinating parts of building one’s own world is figuring out how holidays and festive celebrations fit into it. Though this picture has an obvious Christmas theme to it, it wouldn’t make sense for a plane where no one has ever heard of Jesus or the Christian God to celebrate such an occasion. What would then be plausibly celebrated at around this time of year?

The simple answer is the dawning of a new year, or a given culture calls its cycles. (We’ll stick to years for the sake of convenience.) Regardless of most factors, most people will need some measure of the passage of time, and that measure will need discreet units that can be recorded over long periods. And the celebration of a new year is sufficiently secular that a culture like Enigma’s could still participate in it without seeming strange or out of the ordinary.

This type of exercise can become very interesting once you dissect the practical and cultural reasons that go into the holidays we celebrate in our world, and how another culture might come to similar traditions in their own way. And it’s a fun enough exercise to preserve here for posterity.