Liturgical year
The liturgical year, also called the church year, Christian year, ecclesiastical calendar, or kalendar,[1][2] consists of the cycle of liturgical days and seasons that determines when feast days, including celebrations of saints, are to be observed, and which portions of scripture are to be read.[3]
For Dom Guéranger's series of books, see The Liturgical Year.Distinct liturgical colours may be used in connection with different seasons of the liturgical year. The dates of the festivals vary somewhat among the different churches, although the sequence and logic is largely the same.
Scholars are not in agreement about whether the calendars used by the Jews before the Babylonian exile were solar (based on the return of the same relative position between the Sun and the Earth), lunisolar (based on months that corresponded to the cycle of the moon, with periodic additional months to bring the calendar back into agreement with the solar cycle) like the present-day Jewish calendar of Hillel II, or lunar, such as the Hijri calendar.[4]
The first month of the Hebrew year was called אביב (Aviv), evidently adopted by Moses from Ipip as the eleventh month of the non-lunar Egyptian calendar,[5][note 1] meaning the month of green ears of grain.[6] Having to occur at the appropriate time in the spring, it thus was originally part of a tropical calendar. At about the time of the Babylonian exile, when using the Babylonian civil calendar, the Jews adopted the term ניסן (Nisan) as the name for the month,[7] based on the Babylonian name Nisanu.[8] Thomas J Talley says that the adoption of the Babylonian term occurred even before the exile.[9]
In the earlier calendar, most of the months were simply called by a number (such as "the fifth month"). The Babylonian-derived names of the month that are used by Jews are:
In Biblical times, the following Jewish religious feasts were celebrated:
Secular observance[edit]
Because of the dominance of Christianity in Europe throughout the Middle Ages, many features of the Christian year became incorporated into the secular calendar. Many of its feasts (e.g., Christmas, Mardi Gras, Saint Patrick's Day) remain holidays, and are now celebrated by people of all faiths and none—in some cases worldwide. The secular celebrations bear varying degrees of likeness to the religious feasts from which they derived, often also including elements of ritual from pagan festivals of similar date.