1. notleia says:

    I went to a Obon (Bon) festival this year. St Paul is a sister city to Nagasaki, and Como park has a legit Japanese garden. I wasn’t even the only white hipster weeb in a kimono. They had the little lantern boats on the ponds and a dozen Asian food trucks.

    I don’t have the energy for Halloween this year. My decor is just leaving the wads of black cat hair where they lie.

    • Travis Perry says:

      Sounds like an interesting holiday! I know very little about it. My world travels have taken me to Europe, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia. But I’ve never been to the Far East and don’t know as much about the cultures there as I’d like.

  2. My family practically never celebrated Halloween, but we did go to Christian fall festivals that local schools held. And we did decorate for fall, though not Halloween, which suited me just fine. Fall’s my favorite season, which is why my pen name is Autumn, but I never really liked being afraid and thus had no problem with my parents avoiding the celebration of scary things.

    I agree that many cultures were probably making celebrations of the dead in coordination with agricultural cycles, but it is worth noting that holiday celebrations can shift around until they take place at a different time than the original events they commemorate. Like, we choose to celebrate Christ’s birth on Christmas when he probably wasn’t born then.

    An interesting thing would be to see how holidays might change as cultures moved to other places with different weather patterns. Like if they were used to living in a place with four seasons, but then moved to another place that only had a rainy season and a dry season or something.

    • Travis Perry says:

      Your comment on holidays changing seems especially appropriate when talking about alien worlds with different length years…it would be literally impossible to have holidays in the same season all the time with the same length of time as on Earth.

What do you think?