Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #154 - Spring Rites

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Spring Rites

Humanity has celebrated the start of warm weather, longer days and plants growing again at least since people settled down and started farming. Probably longer; I suspect (but can't prove) that hunter-gatherer societies celebrated a time when things became more abundant again.

Many calendars (ancient and modern) use the Spring Equinox as the start of the year. It includes the Babylonians, Ancient Persians and Romans, and is a reason why in the UK the tax year starts near the beginning of April rather than on January 1st. Over time, the celebrations became religious as well as calendar holidays; Ostara (Easter), Nowruz, Passover, etc. Also Mother's Day - perhaps an indirect reference to the worship of fertility goddesses.

How do people celebrate spring in your fantasy of sci-fi setting ? If it's a sci-fi one, do they celebrate it on worlds where the calendar might look totally different, or perhaps still hold on to Homeworld traditions that make no sense ? Do people give gifts of eggs (chocolate or otherwise) ? Or perhaps they plough the previous year's king into the ground as the pre-Helladic Greeks supposedly did (although modern scholars hotly debate this, and there's a theory that if it happened at all, a substitute dressed as the king was used) ? Do people in your setting celebrate it as a religious holiday, or a civic one ? Is it still linked to fertility and growth, or has the meaning been lost to time ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.
• AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
• Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.

People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah

If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂