FEAST OF LOTS

With its raucousness, relentless clowning, and borderline bawdy theatrics and masquerades, purim is the most unbuttoned of jewish holidays, inadvertently echoing Mardi Gras and other pre-lenten carnivals occuring at this same time of year. Some anthropologists hold that purim is no less than a descendant of the orgiastic Babylonian New Year, on which Marduk and his fellow gods were said to gamble by casting lots (purim in the Babylonian language). The consensus, however, is that Purim commemorates one queen Esther, who with her cousin Mordecai, thwarted a massacre that had been engineered by the anti Semitic royal adviser, Haman. (Haman, it is said, ended up on the gallows).
Purim is the only day of the Jewish year on which celebrants are canonically permitted in fact encouraged to drink themselves silly. After a formal reading from the Book of Esther to usher in the holiday, many temples sponsor Purim carnivals, complete with song dance, and games of the knock over bottles painted with Haman's face variety. Carnival booth after hamentaschen, triangular filled cookies that represent Haman's three cornered hat. Throughout the day, revelers are encouraged to stomp the floor, blow horns, and whirl graggers (special low pitched noisemakers) whenever Haman's name is mentioned.

GAY FREEDOM DAY

The was a time in American when same sex couples could be arrested for dancing together in public, when women could be arrested for wearing suits that had been manufactured for men. Through out the paranoid fifties and well into the sixties, gay bars were both refuges and targets, and they were regularly seldom justifiably raided by jeering police. On June 27, 1969, police burst into the stonewall in New York's Greenwich Village. Five gay bars nearby had been raided over the previous week, and now the stonewall's clientele rose up in defiant anger, shouting, hurling furniture at the police, and refusing to leave. The standoff lasted all weekend, at the end of which the bar was a charred ruin. But the gay pride movement was born. In the wake of what is now known as the stonewall Rebellion, myriad solidarity , support, and activist organizations sprang into being. Gay historians now cite two distinct eras: Before stonewall and After Stonewall.
Gay Freedom Day, Usually observed on the weekend nearest June 27, is a time for reflection, reunion, and renewed dedication not to mention dazzling parades.

BUDDHA'S BIRTHDAY

Unlike other big spiritual honchos, the Buddha was not a god. He was just a man, albeit a royal one, the princely son of an admittedly corrupt Brahman monarch. Same 2,500 years ago, in India, a white elephant intimated to the monarch's wife that she had conceived a child. she strode into the palace garden, where according to legend she painlessly birthed a son. As a young man, this Siddhartha Gautama bade farewell to all princely delights and sallied forth seeking and eventually finding enlightenment.
While most Asian Buddhists celebrate the Buddha's birthday according to the lunar calendar, Japanese Buddhists observe it every April 8. The Japanese name for it, Hana Matsuri, means "flower festival," an allusion to the season and to the garden in which he was born. On this day, every Japanese Buddhist temple sports a flower festooned, peaked roofed, portable shrine, a hanamido. Under the peak roof stands a bronze statue of the infant Buddha, pointing up at the sky with his right hand down to earth with his left. He stands in a basin filled with a dark, naturally sweet tea, ama cha, brewed from hydrangea leaves. A ladle lies poised in the basin. After the temple service, the congregants line up at the hanamido, taking turns using the ladle to pour tea over the statue's head.
In Hawai'i, where it is an official state holiday, Hana Matsuri is known as Buddha Day.

RAMADAN

Ramadan is the name of the name of the ninth month of the Muslim calender a lunar calendar whose months change in thirty three year cycles so in one year the holiday might fall in one season, the next year another. It is said that on the twenty seventh day of Ramadan, Allah sent the Koran to Mohammed from heaven, and at the same time the tree of paradise trembled. To mark these momentous events, Muslims fast for forty days. By night they may eat; in fact, they feast. But from down to dusk or in Mohammed's words, "while it is possible to distinguish the white thread from the black" they abstain from all food and drink, as well as snuff and tobacco.
The days are hard, espesially in those years when Ramadan falls during a demanding harvest season. The boom of a gun or cannon signals the dusk and the start of evening prayers, after which the famish celebrants break the fast with a quik handful of dates or nuts, or a glass of orange juice.
The evening meal varies from place to place: in Morocco, the favorite Ramadan dish is harira, a hearty vegetable soup made with lamb, noodles, and much red pepper.

CHRISTMAS

Whole books have been written about this festival of good cheer, which christians hold to be birthday of Yesus and which in the ancient world was just as fervently held to be the birthday of the fiery sun god, mithras. Clinging to the coattails of the winter solstice, christmas celebrations in all their myriad permuttations hint at hope, at light in the darkness, warmth within the chill.
The Germans popularized the now universal Christmas tree as well as certain prominent holiday carols. Their Christmas dinner often features roast goose and christstollen, bread loaves stuffed with raisins, citron, and nuts. (Berliners, however, eat carp.) The portuguese cepo de Natal, "christmas log", is a hank of oak that burns on the earth all through the day while people enjoy a lingering consoada, the christmas feast.
In spain, where christmas is navidad, people go to church, exchange presents, and many play on swingsets set up specially for the occassion. Swingsets at solstice time evokes an ancient desire to encourage the sun, urging it to "swing" ever higher in the sky. Bulgarians make christmas wishes around the fire and eat blood sausage. Albanians, like finns and danes and a great many Europeans, attend early morning mass. Afterwards they sit down to a rich egg lemon soup with tripe. Rumanians tote big wooden stars through the streets and put on puppet shows based on the life of Jesus. Belgians, meanwhile, tell ghost stories.

CHINESE NEW YEAR

The lunar new year traditionally celebrates the earth's renewed fertility. The fifteen day New Year season finds celebrants sandbagging themselves and each other with the food, colors, shapes, sounds, and even syllabels that bespeak health, happiness, fertility, and fortune for the coming twelve month span.
In the spirit of setting things straight, all account books should be balanced, debts paid off, and houses cleaned before New Year's Day. Then houses, businesses, and streets are decked and draped with banners, flowers, and scroll of vivid red, a traditionally lucky and demond dispelling hue. People exchanged red wrapped gifts, most commonly the hong bao cash enclosed in a compact red paper packet and offer their friends propitious edibles such as red dates (whose chinese name, hong zao, sounds like the words for "prosperity comes soon") and tangerines (whose cantonese pronunciation, kat, sounds like that of the word for "lucky").
While celebrants avoid using swearwords during this season, and parents warn their children againts inadvertently blurting out such inauspicious words as death or disaster, this is by no means a time for keeping silent. Street festivals are alive with sound of firecrakers. (when these were banned in Singapore, resourceful celebrants played cassette tapes of exploding firecrackers.)

MAY 31 ( FLOWERS OF MAY )

In the Catholic world, the month of May is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and is celebrated at the very least by the garlanding of Mary statues in churches, convents, and Catholic school. In the Philippines, May is a time of intense festivity. All month, schoolchildren assemble bouquest and floral offerings and take them to church. Meanwhile, girls elected to serve as festival queens parade through the streets dressed in the national costume, the butterfly -sleeved terna dress, surrounded by page boys, flowers girls who scatter petals, and their relatives and neighbors who sing and chant Hail Marys.
On the last night of May, this extended festival culminates with torchlight parades, open houses, games, and richly elaborate banquets. A feature of these is the Filipino variation on the mexican pinata: a bamboo frame from which dangle packages of sweets, fruit, and toys on strings. Children leap at the packages while adults control the strings by means of pulley system. In Manila, this is one of the biggest nights of the year, and many people attend formal balls.

APRIL 1 ( APRIL FOOLS' DAY )

The Romans celebrated thier New Year's Day in spring, the unmistakable season of rebirth and renewal , with an eight day revel from March 25 to April 1. This tradition persisted for centuries, until the French King Charles IX altered the calender, officially adopting January 1 as the new New Year's Day. Some people took much longer than others to find out about the change.
And once the news spread, still it was hard for many to fully absorb and adopt the shift. From this confusion sprang the now worldwide custom of marking the old New Year's Day, April 1, with meanspirited pranks.
In France, the prankee has come to be known as a possion d'avril, an April fish: that is, young and naive, easily caught. Poor Robin's Almanack of 1928 detailed the day's trademark "sleeveless errands":
No sooner doth All-Fools' morn approach. But waggs, ere Phoebus mount his gilded coach,
In sholes assemble to employ their sense,
In sending fools to buy intelligence,
One seeks hen's teeth, in farthest part o ' th ' town
Another, pigeon's milk

ON HIS PLAN FOR YOUR MATE

Everyone longs to give themselves completely to someone, to have a deep, soul relationship with another, to be loved thoroughly and exclusively but God to the Chrestian says:

" No, not until you are satisfied, fulfilled and content with being loved by Me with giving yourself totally and under-
sevedly to Me. To be having an intensely personal and unique relationship with me alone discovering that only in Me is your satisfaction to be found, will you be capable of the perfect human relationship that I have planned for Me.
You will never be united with one another until you are united with me exclusively to anyone or anything else. I want you to stop planning, stop wishing and allow Me to give you the most thrilling excifing plan. One that you can not imagine, I want you to have the best.
Please allow Me to bring it to you, you just keep watching Me, expecting the greatest things. Keep experiencing the satisfaction that I am. Keep listening and learning the things I tell you, you just wait - thats all."
Don't be anxious, don't worry, Don't look around at all things.
Other have gotten or that I have given them. Don;t look at the things you want. You just keep lookinf off and away up to Me or you'll miss what. I want to show you and when you're ready.
I'll surprise you with a love for more wonderfull than you will dream. You see, until you are ready and until the one I have for you is ready. (I am working even this moment to have both ready at the sometimes) until you are both satisfied, exclusively with me and the life. I have prepared for you.
You want be able to experience the love than exemplifies you relationship with Me and thus, perfect love.
And dear one, I want you to have the most wonderful love. I want you see in the fiesh a picture of your relationship with me and to enjoy materially and concretely.
The ever lasting union of beauty, perfection, and love I offer you.
Believe it and satisfied.

OCTOBER 25 ( SAINT CRISPIN'S DAY)

Popular legend hails Saint Crispin and his erstwhile companion, Crispinian as a pair of third -century Zealots who traveled from Rome to Soissons in France. There, it is said, they divided their remaining years between preaching the gospel and making shoes.
Crispin's feast day is remembered by shoemakers and leather workers, of whom he is patron saint. In the Aupulia region of the saint's nativ Italy one town celebrates the day with a huge caizane feed. And in King Henry V, Shakespare wrote about the battle of Agincourt, which took place on October 25, 1415, on the banks of the river Somme in France. Henry's exhauted soldiers were victorious, although out numbered five to one by the leaping, fresh-as-a daisy French army. The batlle was a bloodbath. Shakespeare wrote:
This day is call'd the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of crispian:
He that shall live this day and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neigbors,
Then he will strip his sleeves and show his scars,
And say, These wounds I had on Saint Crispin's Day