How do you come up with unique holidays that aren't generic "hurr durr muh harvest"?

Have a situation where the ruling monarch's birthday is celebrated in the middle of summer regardless of when it actually is. (Just like they do in the UK).

Have a celebration for the first of a season.

Mid-winter celebration. (yuletide)

Take a random societies agrarian holiday.
A different culture adopts this holiday, adds some symbolism.
Yet another culture adopts the holiday, converts the purpose and theme to represent religious figures, while maintaining some of the previous symbolism.

And now Jesus's friend the giant rabbit hides eggs everywhere!

Don't tone police me you shit lord.

>Tone was wrong.
>on Veeky Forums
I... What?

sowing festival

Certain events can be important enough to warrant a holiday of their own. A great one is when a great battle was won, or when a country was formed. Perhaps the day a demon lord was slain deserves a holiday?

I also like tying holidays to specific people. In one game, I have a nation whose constituency usually has a huge holiday dedicated to a terrorist that tried to overthrow a tyrant. The day is celebrated with protests to release the terrorist from prison.

Annual party gods visit to the material realm makes everyone super fucking festive.

Don't forget the "It's so fucking hot/cold this time of year, let's just take the day off from work and relax" holiday

Here's your (You)

Reddit pls

"Every planetary alignment, the Goddess of The Stars and The Heavens opens the gate to the other side, that all who were good in life might pass on."

"If we weep, they will worry, and they will stay too long, and the gate will close until the next alignment which only happens every five years."

"So we will celebrate them every night for three nights, and we will sing of the good they did in life, and we will feast and light the way to the heavens with bursts of light and fire."

"We will not say 'stay with us! We need you!' even though it is in our hearts and in the back of our throats. We will say instead, 'You have done your job! Go and rest!', yes, even as we feel empty sides of beds and sadly glance at empty chairs."

tl;dr: A festival meant to honor those who died every five year period and guide them to the afterlife with fireworks. Exceptions are made for those who lost loved ones very recently.

On the opposite end:

"Day of The Abyss"

"Ask a criminal if he'd prefer to be boiled in oil on any other day, or killed by a swift-axe on the Day of The Abyss, and he will gladly prepare the fire and cauldron himself."

"For the ghosts of those who died in wickedness with sin unatoned for might find redemption wandering the land, learning remorse and cautioning travelers, but the wicked who die on that day are dragged straight to the Abyss. For the gods cursed the fiends to only feed on sin, and a wicked soul is nothing but sin. Hence, to fall into the abyss is not the start of a new life in a hereafter, it is the foreverend."

"Any other villain or wicked one who dies has 1 day for each good deed they did in life to repent and feel remorse, to make restitution best they can. The wicked who die on the Day of The Abyss have no such leniency."

"Hence, we save the rapists, the mass murders, and those who hurt children to die on that day."

You don't really need unique holidays, you just need new or unique activities do do.

>Town assembles rickety muscle powered rides durring it's harvest festivel
>Their shoddy nature and high chance of breaking down make test of courage for young children, and those who don't ride one of the frightening are considered "chicken"
>Most of the rides could use horses for power, but they tend to use manpower instead
>Striping down and tugging on the ropes is considered to be right of passage for young men. Particularly good shows of strength and endurance earn some crowds of giggling young women.
>Old men and women rarely participate, but reminisce on the rides of old, and comment on some of the more venerable rides being around when they were children. Others tell horror stories to young children to make the rides seem even more ominous to the younger children.

>Tone
>Veeky Forums

There is nothing that can be said. It's either bait or fractal level faggatory. Either way have Requiem.

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Focus on the ceremonies not the whys and wherefores.

>why do we do this? we always have

I wrote this ages ago as a description of a festival, maybe it will serve as inspiration:

ideaswithoutend.wordpress.com/2014/12/29/short-story-the-waiting/

I have a friend who legit thought that Jesus WAS the Easter Bunny.

OP, there's your holiday.

Read James Frazier's "The Golden Bough." Yes, all 9000 pages of it.

You'll learn all you ever need to know about everything to do with ancient cultures. Hint: none of them are unique.

Base them around a mythical event or something in people's lives, rather than a real event that is set during a certain season.

>Today is the day our mythic ancestor, Denos, won the rune of flight from Kenaborus that allowed him to travel the world in adventure. So it is the day that, after enough years have passed, a boy is considered a man in turn and to take on his own path in life, and we all celebrate in honor of the many adventures yet to come.

A day of the dead style festival where you bring out the skulls of your loved ones to party with you

The second from the left looks like my desi ex :(

I had a pretty interesting couple of holidays for one of my countries.

The biggest was a celebration of the time they actually won a military victory. The one time they managed to win a military victory. The one, single time they managed that god damn miracle. Their military is garbage and a fucking apocalypse magnet. Random earthquakes are the least of their problems when they try to mobilize.

Another big one was a country-wide mourning for the dead, real somber and stuff, lots of prayers offered to the gods and all that jazz. Because, you know, absurdly high turnover rate on their soldiers.

Make them all harvest festivals and just changing the name.

I just stole Halloween. It's the time of year when the Evil God of the setting demands humans give him sacrifices, or else he sends his bastard monster children to kill them. Little kids dress up as monsters to get candy.

oh okay eric

Independence Day.
Each year, midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice is Independence Day.
It's the day that every teenager that has reached 18 years old gets kicked out of the family home to fend for themselves for a year.

Say what you want about Dishonored, but they actually had a really cool end of year festival called the Fugue Feast. Basically, because that week or so exists out of the calendar, it doesn't exist in historical records. So everyone puts on masks and basically has a giant orgy, then they act like it never happened when the new year rolls around.

This this this this this this this this

So fucking badass

Problem is, in an even moderately sized city, hunting/gathering food would be crowded, and they'd undoubtedly end up just ganging up, essentially making them small tribes rather than lone survivors.

I think the point is learning to be an adult and not be dependent on your family. However you work it out isn't as important as the fact that you worked it out yourself, and I feel like negotiating arrangements with people who aren't obligated to stick around if they don't like you is a valid solution to the crisis of adulthood Independence Day would force/celebrate.

In a custom setting I played in awhile back, one nation in it had a single main holiday called Geddershol. It was a full week long though so not really a day. Anyway what happened was that during this week, the boundaries between hell and the normal world grew thin enough to pass through, and the various demons would enter and throw crazy hedonistic parties all over the kingdom. The citizens would have to force themselves to attend and do all sorts of depraved things (and probably live), hide inside all week (and maybe live, demons don't like it when you're a stick in the mud), or take up arms against them (and definitely die horribly or end up as party decorations). Once its over everyone has a gentleman's agreement to never speak of what they saw or did during that time, and life continues as normal. Bringing up stuff that happened during Geddershol outside of the holiday itself is basically the biggest faux pas you can possibly make, and will get you completely ostracized, but there are still a few pervs who meet in secret clubs to plan activities for next year or just reminisce about the fun times they had.

That is a very modern idea. People of the past WERE dependent on not only their family but their entire community at large

Even today it's a lot more common in some cultures for children and siblings like aunts/uncles to stay at home even past marriage.
Historically the closest thing you had to more modern norms was apprenticeships if you were lucky or just labor since you were a child if you weren't.

The modern "everyone has to go out right after school and get their own house with a garage and white picket fence" bs is more like marketing ploys desu.

>It's not what you said it's how you said it

We were playing a kingdom building DnD campaign and were doing fiscally well at one time, so we accidentally forgot to collect taxes for a whole month. We panicked since it was about to cause a scandal that the kingdom's rulers were morons (which we were), so we made up the holiday of Tax Month as an excuse. It ended up being our kingdom's first tourist attraction, and people from nearby countries would start to flock there for the whole month just to take part in the parties everyone would throw with all of the extra money. It boosted our economy like crazy completely by accident, and it was cool to make an important piece of the kingdom's culture so organically.

I dunno, maybe other holidays got their start like that?

I just recently had the PCs in one of my games stroll into town on the day they placated the local guardian spirit, a Serpent King the size of a train. Most of the festivities took place in town, and kind of hewed to expectations- games, contests, including an eating contest an unexpected member of the party won, and various religious stuff that people were 'getting out of the way' while the priests were out and about.

The mood really changed once they all marched down to the river and gave an offering of game and fish to the Serpent King, that it would destroy all who came to harm the village. No amount of food would get it to not eat the villagers if they strayed into it's territory- but you could definitely sic it on outsiders for the right price.

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Wow. That has to be the most faggy post on the whole of Veeky Forums

War holidays.

Better yet declaration of war holidays while the war is still ongoing.

Entirely for the purpose of boosting morale.

Not on Veeky Forums. Would totally agree with you on the real world, but your kind has no place here.

(You)

Venetian bridge wars
thearma.org/essays/BridgeWars.htm#.WXI8Ddzavcs
>Henry later reportedly complained that the event “was too small to be a real war and too cruel to be a game.”

Also, want to dress weirder than you usually do? Pic related.
azores-adventures.com/2016/01/ritual-masks-of-lazarim-north-of-portugal.html

And a bunch of alternatives:
cracked.com/article_19839_5-giant-city-wide-parties-you-wonE28099t-believe-are-real.html
cracked.com/article_19963_6-insanely-violent-festivals-you-wont-believe-arent-riots.html
cracked.com/article_19579_7-insane-festivals-you-wont-believe-are-legal.html
cracked.com/article_20761_5-terrifying-festivals-you-wont-believe-are-legal.html