Artemis PhD

ALT Day 7: Christmas Christmas is celebrated on the 25th December. It is traditionally a Christian celebration and marks the birth of the christ child, but it is also celebrated culturally every year by many non-Christians and known as a family celebration, thus usually celebrated in the circle of family and friends. Common traditions for celebrating Christmas include setting up a Christmas tree - a fir tree that is decorated with lights, Christmas tree baubles and sometimes sweets - gifting each other presents that are positioned under the Christmas tree before everyone opens their share of the pile, singing Christmas songs and eating a special dinner. Further traditions for the time around Christmas are baking Christmas cookies, the making of Advent wreaths on which four candles are lit - one on every Sunday before Christmas - and opening little doors on so-called Christmas calenders.

ALT Day 6: Ghost Festival The Ghost Festival is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the solilunar Chinese calender, which is in is between July and August. It is believed that on the first day of the month, the gates to the underworld opens and all ghosts and spirits are released into the world of the living, free to wander for the whole month. To welcome them, people hold ceremonies. The most important part of the celebration are the offering rituals, where sweets are thrown as food for the hungry ghosts and then gathered by children (and sometimes adults), and incense and spirit money are offered to them. To guide the wandering spirits during this month, salvation lanterns are placed at the doors of homes and temples and lit at midnight each night during the ghost month. Furthermore, water lanterns are released on rivers and ponds, illuminating them. They allow the ghosts of those who died by drowning to rise and join the celebrations.

ALT Day 6: Halloween Halloween is celebrated on the 31th October and stems from the celtic celebration Samhain and the Christian All Hallows’ Eve. Traditionally, All Hallows’ Eve used to be - together with the All Hallows’ Day and All Souls’ Day - a time to honour Christian saints and martyrs, as well as to remember and pray for the dead, while Samhain marked the beginning of the “darker part” of the year. On the day of Samhain, the boundary between the world of the living and the otherworld was said to thinnen, making it easier for the dead souls and evil spirits to cross over into the world of the living. In popular culture, Halloween is mostly a fun celebration of horror, the macabre and the supernatural. Over time, several customs have mixed together for this day. A lot of people dress up in scary costumes and go from house to house asking for “trick or treat”, hoping to receive sweets.