Celebrations

BUILDING BETTER WORLDS

- MORIAH RICHARD

When you think about celebrations, what comes to mind? Holidays, sure, but what about other events like marriages, graduation, or baptisms?

Whether your story is going to include a sweet romantic moment during a holiday or will show a young magic-user moving through the ranks of their school, you might find yourself in need of a description of a celebration. You'll want to have just enough detail to make the setting feel vibrant and realistic, without listing every single booth at the local fair or how a holiday's traditions have changed over the centuries. To keep you on track, here are just a few considerations.

OCCASION

Personal 

This is probably the one that would be most important to your storyline, no matter your genre. When you're thinking of personal celebrations, it'll probably be easiest to keep it as simple and familiar as possible. Think about standard American birthday traditions-cake, blowing out of candles (though perhaps this is done less often post-COVID), people singing to you, the opening of gifts. Other kinds of personal celebrations could be weddings, births, anniversaries, and even funerals.

You don't have to exactly recreate these sorts of event, but the more familiar the traditions are to the reader, the less time you have to spend explaining them and the more room there is for your plot.

Religion

Especially if you've built your religion from scratch, having some kind of description of holidays or milestones (like the Jewish tradition of Bar and Bat Mitzvahs) will be helpful for your readers to have a complete understanding of this aspect of your world.