The Weight of Celebrations

The next stop on our festival journey is to weigh the festival. Festivals have weight, have gravity that pulls things in, changes meanings and creates new events. Most people I’ve talked to understand this concept even if they can’t put it into words, yet I find fiction treating festivals as weightless entities unable to anchor or affect the things around them. Thus today I’ll be showing how to bulk up those festivals and put that mass to work.

When it comes to the mass of festivals there are two kinds, informal and formal. This split comes from how, and where, the weight comes from and to a lesser degree what they do with it. Informal gathers weight from what people expect. The weight comes from expectations: the activities, the foods, the music, or whatever else will be there. Because these are informal they are also wildly different, meaning these expectations vary from culture to culture leading to some interesting situations. Formal on the other hand carries its weight from history, traditions, and the structure of the festival. These are good contenders for cultural pillars, personal milestones, and the ties that bind everything together.

I recommend going another layer deeper, and as such there are sub-divisions to each of these divisions. Informal I chunk into three pieces, Communal, Personal, and Ad Hoc. Communal are things that often are done in or with a community and have a community presence. A block or neighborhood party would be an example, where people come together to celebrate but don’t necessarily have a solid plan other than ‘food, music, fun’. Personal can be surmised with the date. While I’ll leave the romance for February, personal informal events are events that people know can and should happen on either a one on one or intimate group setting. Meaning I would recommend switching out of this sub division once the group size gets above six or so. Ad Hoc is the most varied of these, and is any event that tends to happen with little to no planning. In all honesty these exist more as a byproduct of other informal and formal festivals.

Formal I also split into three sub-divisions Communal, Institutional, and Personal. Communal is similar to the informal, however there is now enough ‘rules and regulations’ surrounding the event that the structures of the event are taking up weight themselves. Institutional is generally less far reaching, or much wider reaching depending on the institution. The Catholic Church’s celebration of Christmas is a global event, the office party is a formalized event without the global scale. Personal is powerful for the same reasons as the informal, however it is something that now has been formalized often due to tradition. The wedding is the best example, again leaving the wedding notes for next month, it is a personal event with structures, institutions and both of those bring weight to the event.

The sub-divisions help direct ‘what the weight does’ more than ‘where the weight comes from’, so I will loop back to them later. Right now we need to start weighing our festivals. Informal generally are lighter weight. This does not mean that all informal events will be light weight, the original Woodstock festival could, be seen as the heaviest ad hoc event of all time, maybe with parties during the fall of the Berlin wall as its only historical competition. Both serve as examples of high weight informal events. The weight of the event comes from the expectations. Meaning what the culture, and the character, believes will happen dictates the weight when it is in the future, and what actually happened determines the weight in the past. Because the weight of informal festivals comes from expectations and then what happened it leads to a degree of flexibility between characters; since different characters will interpret it differently. This helps to provide depth of opinion for the event and allow for characters to have wildly different views on the same event without having to explain why in depth. Admitting that the different characters or cultures see the informal festival different is often enough to facilitate that.

Formal on the other hand comes from the structures of the festival. What structures, traditions, symbology, and the likes all exist within the festival. The more there is, and the bigger deal it is the more weight it has. Like the expectations found in the informal division these formalized structures are what provide, expectations but more importantly rewards and punishments of the festival. The older the festival the more weight it will build up as each round the formal nature of the festival gets further entrenched. This isn’t to say that it is impossible for a formal festival to be light weight, they tend to be the smaller reaching ones but the older and larger the formal festival the heavier it is.

This division in where the weight comes from affects how they interact with the story. To pull our example of the Autumn Ball forward the Autumn Ball is a formalized event. It is a formal ball, there is a style of etiquette, dress code, dances, and possibly a bit of magic that are all there to put a spotlight on the various people participating in the Autumn Ball. Which gives it the weight it needs to adjust test dates, have professors announce warnings, and everything else. Say before, maybe the weekend before our heroine has gotten the date, but she has a minor problem she needs a dress. After confiding in her roommate she is taken on an ad hoc informal shopping spree/girls weekend that she is totally unprepared for. This surprise festivity serves as our informal festival. Heroine’s expectations of what it will be from the moment her roommate puts it together will show how little it weighs.

With the shopping spree added to the timeline it shows another thing to make note of, heavy weight events can create lighter weight ones that precede them. This is one of the ways a heavy festival can use its weight, yet there are others. All festivals use their power in four common ways: creation, compression, transformation, and destruction. Creation I highlighted in that example. The heavy festival, the Autumn Ball, created a lighter one in front of it. Creation events do not have to be in front of the event. They can also be behind the event, as people create smaller events in the wake of the heavy event. It also gives people permission to do things that normally they wouldn’t: think of all the foods cooked for holidays and only those holidays. Compression is when things get pushed together to fit the heavy event. It can be anything, have it be the every day stuff. The patterns of life are knowingly getting displaced in the future thus they are trying to be crammed in before it gets here, or after the event has finished the mad dash to make up for the time spent in the festival. It forces deadlines, cuts decision times and untimely raises the stakes of the decisions. Transformation is when things shift their focus, meaning, or theming to fit the upcoming or recently passed festival. Characters should be thinking about how there’s more meaning tied to everything. Likewise every day activities may change because there’s more to them a this point in time. Destruction is when the festival flattens things to make sure it happens, and that it remains unaffected by what should, or would, be taking place assuming the festival wasn’t there. Some obligations will be cleared because of the festival or celebration. Objections may also follow a similar pattern as the festival clears them out of the way.

Each festival will reveal its weight through these ways. The Autumn Ball can show its weight by transforming the lectures and interactions that come before it. Some of those interactions may be so transformed they create smaller celebrations, as I outlined in the example. It also compresses where the midterms go, to either before or after its weekend. It also destroys what normality the town would have on that weekend. With the Autumn Ball using all four, if they are shown in the story, the weight is fairly immense. The shopping trip and girls weekend before the ball has its own smaller weight, transforming the view of our leading lady and destroying what little plans she had for the weekend. Again using that weight to provide character moments, and growth is how we add to the plot. I will note, that there is a possibility for heavy to lend weight to light. The created celebrations will likely be under the transformation of the heavy celebration that created them. To illustrate this, think of how the weekend would play out differently if the Autumn Ball wasn’t a week out, instead it was just a hot date our heroine didn’t feel prepared for.

Determining exactly how the weight gets used is where I bring in my sub-divisions. In the informal division the personal almost exclusively transforms things. Ad hoc almost exclusively works by compressing, due to the sudden nature of the celebration. Communal informal generally destroy and transform, as they clear space and change what remains in that space. Formal will almost always hit transformation by the nature of being a formalized festival. Communal will double down on transformation and touch on destruction and compression. Institutional will depend on institution, as it splits between creation and compression with the final balance depending on the institution. Personal is a wild card; as it can hit all four, and often does. However personal formal events are so varied they are the topic of next week’s Worldbuild Wednesday.

That leaves me with the final point. Using the weight these festivals produce to rewrite the framing of the situations the characters end up in and give them more meaning. The heavier the festival the more power it will bring and the more that will be affected by it. Think of meeting a girl, or guy, one on one to go over a partner’s project the weekend of Valentine’s Day? Even if it isn’t on the date itself that will transform the meaning, and perhaps having both parties thinking as much about the possible implications as much as the project. More simply: If the festival or celebration can change an activity or interaction it should be considered. By doing that the audience will realize how important the festival is to the characters and add in another layer of implications, consequences, and stakes for them to invest and think about.

In conclusion think about if a festival has been formalized or if it hasn’t. Use that to guide how much weight it has and what ends up stuck in its orbit. Then apply that weight and the effects to the plot and how the characters think about life around the time of the festival itself. That will bring the festival together and ground it into the world, and the minds of your audience.

This week is one of the more powerful pieces of the festival structure I’ve been building this month. If you want future editions of Worldbuild Wednesday sent straight to your inbox, subscribe.

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