Holiday Building Template - Free Download
Holidays, festivals, and celebrations are an important fixture in nearly every culture. While the specifics might differ, the effect of bringing people together for a common cause remains the same. These events commemorate important days, people, and events, and are almost always culturally significant in some way.
Adding holidays to your cultures can be an easy and quick way to add some depth and uniqueness to those cultures. By creating holidays you can help show those exploring your world that culture in a way that doesn’t feel too heavy-handed. It’s very much a show don’t tell method of expanding your world.
In this article, we’ll look at an easy method you can use to create your own holiday, festival, or celebration for your world. We’ll also take a look at how culture and holidays are intertwined and point out some key things to keep in mind. By the end, you’ll have a quick method for not only creating a holiday but you’ll also know why/how that holiday came about and how it fits into the celebrant's culture as a whole.
We’ll also talk a bit about incorporating them into your games if that’s your cup of tea. If not, then many of these tips still apply for those building worlds for other reasons like writing a novel or just for fun.
Note, throughout this article I’ll be using the words holiday, festival, and celebration pretty interchangeably. This is just so I’m not writing out all three each time, the ideas below can apply to any of them.
Also, we have a published supplement that contains 9 premade holidays for use in your games. If you want some ready-made ideas/inspiration checkout "Local Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations".
Why Create Holidays At All?
First off, let’s take a look at why you might want to create a holiday or festival in the first place. Simply put, they’re a great way to add flavor and uniqueness to your cultures and create memorable moments to relate to. They can also be a great way to add some variety and depth to cultures that might share a celebration across its people.
A big challenge when building worlds is to make all your towns, villages, and peoples feel distinct. It’s very easy to end up in a rut of the nth generic town, which can end up being quite dull.
Having a holiday, festival, or celebration is a quick and easy way to help alleviate some of that sameness. You want your players, readers, or whoever is digesting your world to say “Remember that town that was having the lunar festival? That was awesome!”. These types of events help to create a unique moment, and that’s often enough to make an otherwise boring town memorable.
They can also help you flesh out the town’s history and social structure a bit more. What types of celebrations a town or nation has can tell you a lot about it. A place that has a harvest festival is likely going to be different from one that has an annual hunt, and even more different from a village that has an annual day of worship for a nearby meteor. The purpose and reasons for a town’s celebrations can help give you ideas about what it’s like to live in that town, and what the citizens there deem as important.
Now, that’s not to say that every town or city needs to have some type of ongoing celebration. Overused it can quickly become cliche and lose some of the excitement earlier encounters brought. It’s a good idea to limit the amount of times you use holidays to make them feel exciting and uncommon. Remember, there are a lot of ways to achieve the same effect, so make sure to vary them to keep things interesting.
That’s not to say that places can’t all have their own holidays and traditions, but if every village you explore always seems to be in the midst of a celebration it can very quickly start to lose any real impact.
How To Create a Holiday
I find the best way to create a holiday, festival, or celebration is to break it down into a handful of key questions. Once you answer these questions below you’ll have a fully created holiday to work into your world.
Why Does The Holiday Exist?
The first thing I like to think about is why the holiday exists in the world. Looking at real holidays, take Christmas as an example, there’s a real meaning behind why that holiday exists and why people celebrate it. Any type of celebration or holiday is likely to have some sort of meaning behind it, the answer to why people celebrate in the first place.
Start by defining the purpose of the holiday. This can be to commemorate an event, celebrate a time of the year, or even have superstitious connotations. Maybe it has religious ties or is associated with a specific person. Here are a couple of examples to get the creative juices flowing.
To celebrate the victory of an important battle.
A form of religious prayer to ask their god(s) for protection or grace.
To commemorate an important or influential person.
To celebrate a successful harvest season.
To celebrate the coming of spring or other seasons.
To venerate an important person or object.
A ploy to stimulate the local economy under the guise of religion.
Just for fun.
These are just a handful of ideas, there are thousands of other options. If you’re having trouble, think about real-world celebrations and their origins. I find it helpful to look past my own culture or at those in the distant past to help generate fresh ideas.
How deep you go here is up to you. Some holidays might have a simple explanation that can be described in a few sentences. Others might have lots of history and require pages of lore to adequately explain. Either option can work, it really all depends on your world. My advice here is to start small, a couple of sentences at most. Then, you can expand if needed.
Where and Who Celebrates?
The next step, defining who and where celebrates it, goes hand in hand with the above. It’s difficult to disassociate the people observing the holiday and the reason for its observance. While these are two separate steps, I often find it helpful to think of them in tandem. You can easily reverse the two and think of the society first and then consider the types of celebrations they might have.
For who, think about the types of people that observe the holiday as well as those that don’t. Maybe the entire town celebrates with no one openly abstaining. Or, perhaps a sizable portion of the people don’t participate for one reason or another. These types of social interactions can lead to interesting ideas in your world. Do only the rich celebrate, what about the poor? These types of questions are fun to explore and can lead to interesting ways the different layers of society interact.
For where, consider the geographical region that celebrates. A harvest festival might be just a small village, while an observance for a past war might be observed by an entire nation’s worth of people. This can be a good way to culturally link different areas together, or culturally separate certain groups.
When Does The Celebration Take Place?
Fairly simple but no less important is to define when the celebration takes place. Small ones might just be a single day while others could encompass an entire week or longer. Bear in mind that for longer celebrations you’ll have more work to do in the next step where you define the specifics of the holiday.
It can also be an interesting exercise to imagine how a long-running festival might impact the locals. These types of celebrations might attract outside people and this can lead to a whole host of boons and banes for the town. For example, the influx of people might lead to an uptick in the local economy but also mean an increase in crime too. These types of interactions can make the world more believable while also creating interesting scenarios for the characters in your world to explore. Also, consider what effect it might have on non-holiday days. Going back to Christmas as an example; Christmas is technically only celebrated on a specific day, but it’s hard to escape during the entire month of December. Just because a holiday takes place on a certain date doesn’t mean it can’t have a reach far beyond that.
What Does The Holiday Entail?
The last piece of the holiday itself, I always find this to be the most fun part of the whole process. This is where you create the specifics of what the celebrants do during the holiday. It’s here you’re answering the question ‘What are the people doing during the celebration, what does a day for them look like?’.
It’s easiest here to just give some examples, so here’s a few
Recite Prayers
Light Candles/Incense
Eat/Drink Specific Things
Have a Group Feast
Make a Pilgrimage to an Important Place
Gather as a Group
Sacrifices
These are very basic examples, and can be combined in many cases. One example might be having the entire town gather to feast on the recent hunt's catch.
Once again, it can be interesting to consider how the specifics inform culture and vice versa. A culture that participates in human sacrifices during its most important celebration is likely to look far different than one that simply recites prayers. This is one last area to help tie your created holiday to the culture at large.
Here’s a couple of more sub-questions related to the specifics of a holiday to consider:
What is the mood of the holiday? Happy? Sad? Reflective?
Do participants eat any specific foods during the holiday?
Are there specific decorations, colors, or motifs associated with the holiday?
What about clothing, do some/all/none of the people wear or not wear certain things?
One, all, or none of the above might apply to your holiday.
How Can The Party Get Involved?
Last, and not strictly related to holiday creation, I like to think of a few ways that the party can get involved. While these sorts of things can often come about organically, I find it helpful to have a few ideas already drawn up. That way, I can guide my players if they’re stuck or otherwise don’t seem to be progressing the story.
- Here are a few examples that are broad enough to apply to a variety of holidays.
- A nefarious group wants to sabotage the celebration and the party has been hired to stop them.
- An important item is missing for the celebration and the party has been tasked to find it.
- An important person related to the celebration and the party is tasked to find them.
- Something went wrong at the celebration and the party has been hired to find out what.
- Some entity, beasts or a rival, attack the celebration and the party must help defend it.
Wrapping Up
Holidays, festivals, and celebrations are great ways to spice up your world, create interesting locations, and flesh out culture. The types of things people celebrate, and how they do so, can give a lot of insight into those people’s culture and the types of things they deem important.
If you’re interested in checking out some examples, or just want some done for you, check out our supplement “Local Holidays, Festivals, and Celebrations” available on DriveThruRPG. This supplement details 9 holidays that are ready to be dropped into any game or setting.
