Portal:Holidays

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Introduction

A holiday is a day or other period of time set aside for festivals or recreation. Public holidays are set by public authorities and vary by state or region. Religious holidays are set by religious organisations for their members and are often also observed as public holidays in religious majority countries. Some religious holidays, such as Christmas, have become secularised by part or all of those who observe them. In addition to secularisation, many holidays have become commercialised due to the growth of industry.

Holidays can be thematic, celebrating or commemorating particular groups, events, or ideas, or non-thematic, days of rest that do not have any particular meaning. In Commonwealth English, the term can refer to any period of rest from work, such as vacations or school holidays. In American English, the holidays typically refers to the period from Thanksgiving to New Year's (late November to January 1), which contains many important holidays in American culture. (Full article...)

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May Day is May 1, and refers to any of several holidays celebrated on this day. May 1 was a traditional springtime holiday in many pre-Christian European pagan cultures, and many elements of these holidays are still celebrated on May 1 today, such as the Maypole. "May Day" also refers to various socialist and labor movement celebrations conducted on May 1, unrelated to the traditional celebrations, to commemorate the Haymarket Riot of 1886 and the international socialist movement generally.

The earliest May Day celebrations appeared in pre-Christian Europe, as in the Celtic celebration of Beltane, and the Walpurgis Night of the Germanic countries. Although the pagan-oriented celebrations faded as Europe became Christianised, a more secular version of the holiday continued to be observed in the schools and churches of Europe well into the 20th century. In this form, May Day may be best known for its tradition of dancing the Maypole and crowning of the Queen of the May. Today many Neopagans, especially Wiccans, celebrate reconstructed versions of the old pagan holidays on May 1.

Selected biography

Guy Fawkes (13 April 1570 – 31 January 1606), also known as Guido Fawkes was an English military man and member of a group of Roman Catholics who attempted to carry out the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November 1605. "The Gunpowder Plot" was a plan to assassinate the Protestant King James I and the members of both houses of the Parliament of England, by blowing up Westminster Palace, in which the king addressed a joint assembly of both the House of Lords and the House of Commons. His activities were detected before the plan's completion, and following a severe interrogation involving the use of torture and a trial in Westminster Hall, he and his co-conspirators were executed for treason and attempted murder. Fawkes's failure (or the attempt) is remembered by Guy Fawkes Night (also known as Bonfire Night or Fireworks Night) on 5 November.

Things you can do
Here are some tasks awaiting attention:
  • Article requests : Check Category:Holidays articles needing attention
  • Cleanup : see Holiday Cleanup List
  • Expand : List of included articles, Place the {{WikiProject Holidays}} banner on all article talk pages that fall within the scope of this project, Add them to the list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Holidays/Articles
  • Infobox : Make a Holiday Infobox for each article
  • Stubs : Review Category:Holiday stubs, Review stubs and add {{Holiday-stub}} to holiday articles
  • Update : Holidays in the upcoming Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries
  • Wikify : Check to see if title follows standardized format, Add the Holiday portal template to the See also section of each article, Add appropriate subcategory classification and remove unnecessary super categories to allow for an efficient category tree
  • Other : Template_talk:Infobox_holiday#Things_to_do; assess all the unassessed articles; review the automatically generated worklist; review recent changes for inclusion in the project

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WikiProjects

Holidays
Religion
Festivals
Sociology
Mythology
Travel and Tourism

Major topics

Religious festivals: Buddhist festivals - Christian festivals - Islamic festivals - Neopagan holidays - Hindu festivals - Jain festivals - Jewish holidays - Roman festivals

Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:


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