Festivals and celebrations are very important to most cultures and exactly how they celebrate them can tell you a lot about the people themselves, of course. Most of the festivals we’ve seen in MLP:FiM are expys of real-life Western holidays. But not all of them are, and in some cases there are some subtle differences.

Most festivals in real life are sourced from two different places. The oldest come from the various agricultural-driven needs like planting, harvesting, or natural events like the longest and shortest days (the solstices). The newer ones are usually sourced from the day specific historical events occurred, although in many cased those get moved around to match up with the older festivals, in order to co-opt them and redirect public energy towards newer religions or nationalistic fervor. Oddly enough, this may work a different way in Equestria.

In real life the dates of the festivals also tend to move around a lot depending on a societies ability to keep calendars. In the real world, the various natural counters of time, days, months, and years, don't actually line up nicely. A solar year always ends at different 'times' relative to the lunar month or the terran daily rotation, leaving extra bits of 'time' lying around mucking up the cycles. Because of this calendar-driven festivals tended to migrate as the year shifted around the calendar. Then you get 'calendar reform'. For example, the calendar most of the West uses used to have ten months. That's why it's September, October, November, December: Sept=Seven, Oct=Eight, Nov=Nine, Dec=Ten. All the months had 30 or 31 days, and there were 51 days that were considered 'outside' the year during the winter. When the year is 'dead', you see. Which is still messed up, because it only adds up to 355 days, which is 10 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 30 seconds short. Rigidly following this calendar means you're calendar is shifting 10 days every year around the seasons.

Our current calendar, the Gregorian Calendar, is only inaccurate by 1 day every 3,000 years, but older calendars had already done enough damage to cause some festivals to be shifted so far around the year that they no longer resemble their original intent.

Equestria likely doesn't have that problem at all, thanks to Celestia and Luna manually keeping the calendar in check. Instead, it is entirely possible that they move the *seasons* to match up with historical event festivals, rather than the other way around.

Spring Festivals

All societies with roots in agrarian cultures celebrate at least two major events, planting and harvesting. Spring is for planting and is usually a fertility festival, with boundless energy and color to celebrate the birth of the new year. In many regions it’s also a harvesting festival for those hardy grains that grow throughout the winter in more tropical and subtropical regions, as that’s when most of the precipitation falls, such as Egypt and Mesopotamia. In Western cultures, the original fertility festival was co-opted by Christians into Easter, bringing along its symbols of fertility; eggs and rabbits. Once fully co-opted, the date was moved around to disconnect it from the original festival in the hopes of finally putting an end to pagan practices. Any case, these types of festivals usually have a big feast of preserved foods, especially those that can only be partially preserved and will likely not last once the ambient temperature rises. Dried fruit, salted meats (though the meat bit is less likely given… well… ponies.), and spring harvest root vegetables will be the most common.

In Equestria, the main spring festival is very obviously Winter Wrap Up, even though it takes place on the cusp between Winter and Spring. The rural area of Ponyville is deeply invested in this festival, and due to the ponies’ increased control of their environment it goes beyond just plowing the fields and sowing the grain, but also bringing animals out of hibernation and removing the winter snow. Which brings up the question as to exactly where they move the snow *to*, but anyway… In Ponyville the Winter Wrap Up is to be completely without Unicorn magic very specifically, which is excused as being because Ponyville was originally an Earth Pony settlement. But Pegasi are allowed to, and are in fact required, to use their special weather-manipulation abilities that the Earth Ponies can't do. So this ban on Unicorn magic seems out of place. There is a possible reason though.

In more urban areas like Canterlot, populated by mainly Unicorns, they don’t celebrate Winter Wrap Up to that extent. Normally I'd say it would be because they are relatively far removed from agricultural needs, and so planting isn’t exactly high on their to-do lists. But given the ban on using Unicorn magic in Ponyville's Winter Wrap Up, it seems that some point in the past Unicorns routinely used their magic in some way that the other races of Equestria viewed as damaging and insulting the festival itself. The blowback of that being Unicorn magic being banned from the festival, and Unicorn-dominated areas abandoning the festival in response.

But there will still be a cultural need for a Spring Festival in Unicorn areas, eventually leaking back into non-Unicorn areas but on a different date. Here we find Hearts and Hooves Day. Now, at first glance this looks like a simple clone of Valentine’s Day, but it isn’t completely. Equestria doesn’t have the greeting card and gift companies that were the driving force behind the real-life Valentine’s Day, so it needs to have some other impetus to drive it. But the main indicator of difference is that Valentine’s Day occurs in what Equestrians would consider the winter, and in the Hearts and Hooves episode you can see that Winter Wrap Up has already occurred as there is no snow on the ground. This means Hearts and Hooves Day is likely close to, or on, the Equinox, the day exactly between the Longest Day and the Longest Night. A day a more organized, urban, and calendar-driven society like the Unicorns would put a festival. Plus it’s pretty obviously a Fertility Festival, a lot more blatantly than Winter Wrap Up. In fact, it's entirely possible that the event that caused Unicorn magic being banned in the Winter Wrap Up may have to do with overt fertility rites that the Unicorns moved to the prototype Hearts and Hooves Day. This wouldn't be the first time festivals were originally one, and were split due to evolving cultural and class differences.

When, and if, Cadence makes the jump to the same status/ability as Celestia and Luna, this will be her day. Alicorn of Love and all that.

Summer Festivals

Next in line is the summer festival; which most cultures put on the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year. In real life in Western culture we’ve mostly lost the official summer festival, Midsummer. In Christian regions this became known as St. John’s Day. In some countries this is still a big, important festival, but in America and similar places almost nobody remembers. Because Midsummer celebrations have lessened in many areas, instead we get smaller regional celebrations that carry less emotional and cultural weight but are still celebrations of summer. Summer Days, summer vacations, etc.

In this category of civic rather than cultural festival, we have the Grand Galloping Gala. According to the MLP:FiM Live show (which is otherwise a mess), this is a after-spring festival that occurs every year. So this is put on the cusp of Spring and Summer. However, that show was so messed up in it's timeline this could be a late summer fete on the cusp of Summer and Fall. Still, it's a major social event but doesn't give the indicators of a cultural festival. It’s likely there are local versions of the Gala all over Equestria, but with different names and dates, possibly all leading up to the Grand Galloping Gala.

But in Equestria they do have a full Summer Festival. The Summer Sun Celebration. Probably due to the ponies exercising full control over the day/night cycles, the longest day of the year also coincides with the day Celestia defeated Nightmare Moon, and now the day that Luna was restored. This festival is presented as a much more formal and ritualistic affair than the other seasonal festivals, which makes sense given that it really is a more calendar-driven celebration that has only ancillary connections to more primitive agricultural roots.

In any case, this is definitely Celestia’s day. There is no doubt about that.

Next week, Fall and Winter.