The Creation of National Holidays in Lithuania: The Aspect of Seasonality

Abstract

This research covers six national holidays introduced in Lithuania between 1919 and 1991. These holidays are more or less related with the country’s history and their dates cover the four seasons of the year. Based on fieldwork data as well as legal acts, memoirs of contemporaries, online sources and press publications, this article aims to analyse the links between national holidays and seasonality between 1918 and 1940, and between 1990 and 2019. The author concludes, that the seasonality of a festival – natural-climatic conditions, relations with agricultural work or the dominant vacation season, religious, ideological or other restrictions on the celebration – has limited possibilities to shape the festival by adjusting festive events. However, overt attempts to frame a holiday as ‘celebrated during a particular season’ or to replace one festive day with another were bound to fail. The vitality of a national holiday, is subject to its content, apprehensible to both the government structures and common citizens who observe the holiday. Throughout the period under consideration the Day of the Restoration of the State, celebrated on the 16th of February, best coincided with the aforementioned conditions. Although extremely unfavourable to public celebration, the birthday of the modern state of Lithuania is the only festival that retained the status of public holiday and non-working day both from 1919 to 1940 and after 1990, and surpasses in popularity other national holidays.