Telling Time (Mark II): Holidays · 7:49pm Feb 10th, 2019
Continuing on this line of work, this edition of the Equestrian calendar documents major holidays. Also included are a few notes on pegasus/earth pony weeks.
With a regular calendar, it's pretty easy to line things up with the lunar cycle and have the holidays all land on weekends. Unicorns might be uptight snobs sometimes but they aren't outright stupid(citation needed).
The list of holidays that I am aware of isn't all that long, and local festivities, such as a harvest festival, would depend a fair bit on where the town is and what they do. Here's the slightly-updated image with some color-coded holidays:
Holidays:
New Year’s Eve - 30 After Winter III - (green)
Spring Equinox - 1 After Spring I Moon - (green)Hearts and Hooves Day - 1 After Spring II - (pink)
Summer Solstice - 1 After Summer I Moon - (yellow)
Summer sun Celebration - 1 After Summer I Moon - (yellow)Autumn Equinox - 1 After Fall I Moon - (orange)
Nightmare Night - 30 After Fall I Moon - (grey)
Hearth’s Warming Eve - 30 After Fall III Moon - (blue)
Hearth’s Warming Day - 1 After Winter I Moon - (blue)
Winter Solstice - 1 After Winter I Moon - (blue)
(Fimfiction doesn't seem to like my use of tab, so hyphens it is.)
There is a notable lack of season-changing holidays like the Running of the Leaves and Winter Wrap-up. The exact dates would probably vary to some degree depending on how far north/south a town is, but the would presumably stay centered on the equinox/solstice of the season.
Some holidays come with an associated Eve, but I suspect that ponies' celebration would spill out several days in either direction regularly. Nightmare Night, for example, may technically be one night, but the entire Nightmare Moon could be seen as a month of spooky times.
You can blame Biscuit for the placement of Hearts and Hooves day; the fact that it follows Foal Moon by 1 out of 12 moons is no coincidence. (...or is it instead that Foal Moon follows Hearts and Hooves day?)
At one point, I thought "what if the ponies used the lunar cycle to divide their Moons into weeks?". At first glance, this looks pretty messy, with our own tracking of the lunar cycle being 8 parts, and that doesn't fit into 30 days very well. Neither do I want to mess with the number of days in a year simply because of that. Other angles didn't look too much better. I next wondered how much they would really care.
So now some thoughts on earth pony and pegasus weeks. Firstly, the earth ponies probably didn't guide their schedules off of the moon's phases all that often and, when they did, it would have been an annual cycle thing of limited accuracy (e.g. 'Plant [X] during Waning After Foal Moon' [AB suggested this]) that would also depend on latitude. Basically, they didn't have weeks, they had moons and nature. Things got done when they needed done and ponies rested when they rested.
Pegasi would have a little more structure, mostly because of military shifts and visibility. A new moon doesn't bode well for seeing in the night, so they'd mostly keep track of whether the moon was progressing towards one or from one. In general, though, shifts may likely be divided with each pony's duties assigned primarily to the Waxing or Waning half of the lunar cycle; a half-moon block of time would be a fairly convenient recurring cycle that doesn't leave things too complicated.
Leave it to the unicorns to have the most arbitrary week structure.
At this point, I think I can make a copy of the calendar and use it to help keep track of things in the diary-format story I'm trying to write.
Adding to what you’ve got so far, I suspect that there would be some kind of holiday on both solstices and both equinoxes.
From the comics, we’ve got plowpony day, or something to that effect.
There would almost certainly be various crop-based holidays for the earth ponies--planting festivals, harvest festivals, etc., and those would vary by location, making a unified calendar difficult. Pegasi, I think, might have some holidays based on previous great deeds/military victories, and unicorns would probably have some based on important historical unicorns. They might also have some agricultural-based holidays . . . in my own headcanon, at least, some unicorns would have had to figure out agriculture pre-unification (but YMMV on that). Pegasi probably never did, since they could generally just fly where the food was.
There’s also Family Appreciation Day, which could be very much local, or it could be national (sort of like mother’s/father’s day).
You know, You could have pegasi use a ten-day structure. Have the new moon coincide with one of the three "watches", called the black watch, both because of its deepening darkness, and it being the perfect time to work the forges. Waxing moon would be the green watch, due to it being the better time to store up food for raids, and because of full moons being battle time, you would give this shift to the younger members of a group.This, then, means the waning moon would be the red watch, the two meanings of which should be clear.
5011379
Ooh, I like that idea.
I do always like the idea of the three tribes doing things a little bit differently but making it work since unity, so I could see pegasus schedules being based on a ten-day week, even though it’s overlaid on top of the other tribes’ six-day week.