Talking about Christian Festivals
There are many festivals that Christianity celebrates and participates in. Christianity celebrates a lot of important occasions or festivals, such as Christmas, Lent, and Easter. There are more that Christians celebrate but Christmas, Lent and Easter are the three main religious festivals we celebrate. In Britain most people celebrate Christmas and Easter. During school, Children get two weeks off on Christmas and Easter.
The Festivals
The Christian year is divided up with events with remind us of the life of Jesus. The Christian year starts off with the season of advent, at the very end of November, which is a period of preparation for the coming of Christ, and then moves through the story of his life to the important focus of Easter and Holy Week. After celebrating Jesus’ Resurrection, the story goes and focuses on the founding of the church itself, with Pentecost and The Holy Spirit approaching, before settling down for a period of teaching and consolidation of the faith during the weeks of Trinity. There are some festivals that the date is changed each year, but Christmas stay the same and celebrated on the same day each year because it is when Jesus was born.
There is a reason why we don’t celebrate some festivals on the same day each year, and the reason is because the Christian Calendar grew out of two other Calendars, the Jewish and the Roman. Jews were a nomadic ( wandering) people in their distant past. The moon was of great importance to them, and they based their calendar on its phases, as they often travelled at night. The first great Christian festivals sprang from Jewish ones.
Under the Roman Empire , the Christian church grew and expanded which followed a calendar which was controlled by the sun. The Roman calendar fixed the dates when the church began to introduce festivals based on its very own, and not based on Jews. The Christian calendar is a dual one with features that have been fixed based on the Roman solar calendar, and movable ones based on the Jewish lunar calendar.
Concluding
Christians have celebrated festivals for so many years, they have had them on different days except Christmas because the dates have been change for other events, except Christmas, it was the day that Jesus was born, and that’s why it does not change. Other festivals change due to the Roman and Jewish calendar, this is because the Christian calendar grew out of the both the Roman and Jewish calendar.
