Christian Festivals

"Pancake Day, or Shrove Tuesday, is the traditional feast day before the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday. Lent – the 40 days leading up to Easter – was traditionally a time of fasting and on Shrove Tuesday, Anglo-Saxon Christians went to confession and were “shriven” (absolved from their sins). "
from https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Pancake-Day/

I had never heard of it. It's the same say as Mardi Gras-- fast Tuesday in Louisiana. It's a French phrase having to do with cooking up the fat and eating it before the fasting starts. It's a different national custom for eating the day before the fasting starts. In New Orleans that might involve parades, floats, people throwing underwear from the floats to the crowd, and all kinds of wild partying, or so I heard. I have never been to the festivities.

I didn't know the Brits ate pancakes. I thought of Sausage, bacon, eggs, toast, and maybe some nasty blood sausage (abstain from things strangled and from blood) and that we got most of those from the UK and pancakes from Swedish, but Brits can eat from from all over.

What about oat meal, cream of wheat, or grits as a breakfast porridge?

No idea Im not british...

I thought it was to use up all the leaven
Because of the passover story though they paganised it to Easter to celeberate spring..bunnies, chocolate eggs. ?! I do know in some churches they claim the egg represents new life.

I think if you squint maybe it does, but Ive never really thought of Jesus as an egg.

IN NZ we tradtionally eat hot cross buns on Easter Sunday or Resurrection day.

The cross representing the crucifixtion of course.

I had no idea what "Pancake day" was but it sounded delicious. So now I learned that it's the same as Shrove Tuesday although that too is more familiar to me by its Finnish name "laskiaistiistai". Our related food tradition doesn't involve pancakes but I'm not complaining as long as I can get some of these:



There are two basic versions, one with strawberry jam and whipped cream, the other with almot paste and whipped cream. I prefer the latter but both are great.

Has anyone wondered what our life would be like if we decided that if God didn't suggest a holiday we wouldn't celebrate it? Or if we decided to follow Christ, celebrating as Christ did.

If we did that then every celebration would be celebrating the eternal life that God the Father planned for us.

God can suggest things to us through our conscience. Follow what you think is right and allow others to do the same.

Some Christian and Christian-esque groups don't celebrate holidays and birthdays. But if you were raised in a family with traditions, we honour our father and mother by carrying forward those traditions.

A hardship in what you are proposing is that in order to celebrate based on the Bible alone, there is much that would need to be speculated on. Some people try to fill the gap by relying on modern Talmudic culture, and this is largely a mistake to assume these rituals would accurately reflect the pre-crucifixion Jewish culture, (supposing they even got it right back then either).

Differences in Christian subcultures are something to celebrate all its own. We don't need to be homogenous in order to be harmonious. I think it is a mistake to assume that we should all forget about our distinctive cultures in order to assimilate into traditions that we never generationally partook of. My family lines all celebrated Lent, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Christmas, etc. I have no inclination to abandon those Christian celebrations for the purpose of replacing them with pre-crucifixion celebrations that existed essentially as vailed forms of what Christians celebrate today.

Part of the celebrations in the OT were obligated by OT ordinances. Ordinances that no longer apply to anyone now that they have been nailed to the cross.

But again, if your faith leads you to these things, it is right for you. I'm just here to point out that faith will lead people differently, and not necessarily because they have lost their way or have weak faith, etc.

Is thanksgiving a christian festival though...not really sure about the story behind it?

It is relative to some Christian subcultures. Even Americans and Canadians observe slightly different celebrations but the common concept is to be thankful for the harvest. This has more to do with cold countries and the scarcity that can occur in winter with a poor harvest.

It would be like the OT Jewish passover reflecting on 40 years in the desert or Christian Lent reflecting on Christ's 40 days in the wilderness. Thanksgiving is a reflection and thankfulness in respect to a culturally significant happening (relative to specific Christian subcultures).

A place near the equator that never experiences seasonal scarcity might not understand or integrate the observation of Thanksgiving into their year. And that's fine too. I think it's fine to have differences between how Christians celebrate some things. But I think it would be a mistake to say that people should lose their localized culture simply to become globally homogenous in every respect.

https://www.diffen.com/difference/Thanksgiving_in_America_vs_Thanksgiving_in_Canada

oh ok

China has mid-autumn festival, which they also celebrate, though they dont call it thanksgiving. Chinese new year they do give gifts though.
Its not christian, just something they have always done.

In NZ Maori have Matariki. Its not christian but is a time of celebration after the kumara harvest round June.

I dont think Thanksgiving was a particularly Christian festival just something americans did.

White Sunday and Gospel Day are celebrated in the Pacific Islands.

Eceryone dresses in white, there are bible readings and choirs all sing their songs, like a perfomance, Its traditional for children to lead the service in churches on that day.

The basic takeaway is that anything can be celebrated in a Christian way (as opposed to being celebrated in a secular way). It's a Christian celebration if Christians celebrate it in a Christian way.

If something has tradionally been recognized and celebrated in a Christian community, it has at the very least become a localized Christian tradition. It's interesting with the White Sunday celebration having overlap with Canadian Thanksgiving.

It can become interesting and almost confusing when we consider that nonChristian groups can celebrate Christian traditional holidays in a nonChristian way. It almost becomes a way of trying to subvert the Christian context in these celebrations (Christmas is a prime example).

But we could almost say that Christianity itself has subverted other cultural celebrations by amalgamation. Samhain was amalgamated into Christianity by the recognition of All Hallows day and All Hallows Eve.

In that sense we can basically just take a step back and appreciate that it's not as though scripture mandates the observance of these holidays (it is permissible to esteem every day the same), but the traditions are observed exist as inheritances from matrilineal and patrilineal ancestries. And in that, though all Christians have a common culture, there exists multiculturalism (microculturalism?) between these subcultures. It can be interesting to think about.

Im going to celebrate ramadan and diwali in a christian way then

I try to care about holidays, only to find them to be tedious, laborious, and a source of stress and frustration. Yall can have them. Im not even sure that i like the number of days off of work. ( i kind of do, like the break from work, but yesterday i found myself thinking about going to work) The weather is always to crappy to go fishing or do work around the house.

Pilgrims, Indians, Quakers, etc... People came together in gratitude for making it through the winter. Previously the first colonials had disappeared, and so it goes. The thanksgiving was and is to God.

For Chinese people, traditional festivals have gradually lost their original flavor.

People have shaped the new shopping festival, November 11 and so on, on that day many people want to cut off their hands, because they are unable to extricate themselves from paying for things.LOL.

In previous years, many young people used to celebrate Christmas, but more often they used Christmas as Valentine's Day. On that day, the main streets of the city were even closed to cars because there were so many young people on the streets that people took over the streets.

But I think the sad thing is that people don't know and understand the true meaning of Christmas to them..

were they Christians, i,e thanking the Father or was it just God however they understood him.

what is the deal with 'black friday' is it an american festival for Black people?

In our daily prayer we ask that God's kingdom come to earth as it is in heaven. We choose to belong to the kingdom of heaven as our true home,. The kingdom of the world is a temporary kingdom, opposite to the kingdom of God. If we belong to the kingdom of heaven, then we listen to the laws of our home kingdom but live temporarily is the kingdom of the world. The kingdom of heaven is ruled by the Lord, the kingdom of the earth is ruled by Satan.

The Lord wants his people to celebrate his plan for their salvation and planned seven celebrations to do that. Satan opposes that. When people belonging to God brings God into the celebration, Satan does all he can to make the celebration his alone.

Which celebrations are you taking about?