strange holiday timing

[cellio]

Most years, Pesach and Easter fall within a few days of each other. This makes sense, because the Christian event is understood to have fallen during Pesach. But because Christianity does not follow the Jewish calendar for setting the holiday, and both computations are lunar, when the holidays aren't a few days apart they're about a month apart, with Easter being first. Fine; everyone knows that, pretty much.

The holiday of Purim falls approximately a month before Pesach.

Easter is constrained to fall on a Sunday, but Pesach can fall on "any" day. Well, there are some calendar oddities that actually rule out a couple days (Wednesday and Friday, IIRC), but mostly Pesach is unconstrained.

This year Pesach happens to fall on a Sunday and Easter is early.

What does this all add up to? That the celebration of Purim, a day on which feasting and drinking are commanded, falls on good Friday, a fast day.

I have heard that there are Christian denominations that observe some Jewish practices, like the seventh-day aventists who celebrate the sabbath on Saturday. I wonder if any of them celebrate minor holidays like Purim. If so, I wonder how they will resolve the contradiction this year. For that matter, I wonder how interfaith families address this. (A similar problem arises in the winter, when a Jewish fast day can fall on Christmas.)

Comments

[cellio]

Yeah, once upon a time I "celebrated" Easter by attending Balticon. :-)

The last few years have been good in a way because I've been able to celebrate Pesach at festival.

That's been good? I find SCA events during Pesach to be a challenge -- probably can't eat anything I didn't bring myself, couldn't use the regular feast gear anyway, etc. Fortunately, it rarely comes up; Pesach is only 7 (or 8) days long, and we are constrained to be in another city for the seders and some extra time, so most years an event in the middle of all that would not be feasible.

[vonstrassburg.livejournal.com]

Festival is probably the best event for Pesach because we all do our own cooking anyway. There are some food vendors on site but I normally camp with a 15th C household that does pretty much everything ourselves from period recipes over open fires. I do a fair amount of the cooking, so making sure there's an amount of pesach friendly food about is fairly simple. Most of my household have gotten used to gefilte fish and even matzo balls, although the matjes herring are a variable success at best. I have plenty of spare feast gear so that's not an issue either.

If you saw my pyes de pares article in Medieval History Magazine or on Cunnan you have a fair idea of what and how we eat, and of necessity most of it is unleavened. Yeast raised pastries don't really work as "coffins" to preserve the insides -- we do festival without any modern accoutrements including refrigeration, so coffins & pies are a fairly important part of our regime. So most of the food is OK for pesach of necessity.

I imagine that if you were really doing pesach in the 15th C while in a travelling camp, what we do is pretty much how you'd do it.