C is for Calendars

One of the things I have been, as a going thing, kind of obsessed with is building a religious calendar. I mean, I have put together a satisfactory draft, even though I am not happy with it, and I haven't done the work to work out what to do for most of these dates. (I had a notion that this year I would work out what to do for each festival by the end of the festival. This resolution lasted for one festival.)

Part of my problem is that everyone around me is fixed on the solar year. Even if I get out of realms where "holiday" is assumed to be "Christian or maybe Jewish unless hey we've heard of Muslims, they celebrate stuff too, right?" and am dealing with general pagan circles, it's all "What are you doing for this sabbat?" and frankly, some pagans are even nastier about the idea that someone might not celebrate their festivals than I have ever encountered from a mainstream monotheist.

Last October, I had a lot of people screaming imprecations at me and telling me how horrible and intolerant I was. Why? Because I (rather gently, perhaps especially for me) pointed out that Samhain was not "the pagan new year", but "the new year for those pagans who celebrate Samhain and consider it a new year". Wep Renpet falls in August. I think my liege - who does also mark Samhain, given that he's largely Celtic-oriented - probably considers Imbolc, yesterday, to be his liturgical new year. (Or at least one of them; I think he might argue he has three.) But simply nothing that Samhain-new-year-celebrator was not an equivalent set to "pagan" got me marked as scum of the earth, the sort of person who was trying to Oppress Everyone Different by ordering them to not talk about their Samhain/new year celebrations.

Calendars are complicated. I have a solar-year calendar which I'm currently using as a basic approximation for what I need to be doing, but as I noted before I'm not done with that yet. It's a beginning. I don't expect to be done with it for a good while. (For one thing I really wish I could find some sort of calendar calculation software that lets me put calculations in that depend on moon phases rather than civil calendar dates.)

But.

I wish I didn't feel I had to fight with other pagans all the damn time for the space to have my own holidays.

I should get back on the horse and figure out what can be done for the Festival of the Lights of Nit....