Ink Doodles Feb + Mar and Jovian Holiday Lore

Contains Jovian Easter Brooms, plant scribbles (real, microgravity crops, and scud planet), possible self depictions by scuds and bug ferrets, fursona and personal symbols, and one Gillie. Lore below.

Jovian National Holidays:

Jovia primarily uses the Solar Gregorian Calendar, though the Martian Common Era Calendar is still used in certain businesses. The Martian Calendar and 24:39 hour day was the standard for Jovia pre-independence from the MFS during WW3, and the change was made as a gesture of their solidarity with Terran allies and a desire to prioritize business with them over Mars. Jovia is also majority secular, with its largest religious minorities being Christian, Hindu, and Astronomites.

Maintenance Weeks:

One of most influential national holidays in Jovia is Easter Feast, sometimes referred to with the portmanteau "Feaster." It is descended from the Christian holiday Easter, though it does not always fall on the same Sunday of the solar calendar. And though Jovia's Christian minorities (mostly congregants of the Martian Church of Christ or Presbyterians) celebrate it as a religious holiday, it has experienced secularization through its association with Spring Cleaning Week.

This week starts on the first Monday of April and is one of two compulsory maintenance weeks in the year for Jovian citizens. It focuses on the cleaning up of green spaces, biosystems, and microgravity farms in your place of residence; either the mega space station Nexus Jovia or one of the settlements on Jupiter’s moons. Jovian citizens are required to fulfill a minimum of 6 hours of maintenance during the first 6 days of the week unless they have a registered exemption; signups open the preceding week and there is generally a scramble as citizens try to get slots in some of the less exhausting or gross jobs. Easter Feast occurs on the final day, and wraps up the toil of the week with community potlucks and private feasts. Many people with family on the Jovian system will travel to see them for Feaster, and Nexus Jovia is at its most crowded during the Spring holiday season.

Perhaps the most important part of Spring Cleaning Week is the switching out of the microgravity farms. Older crops are harvested on mass and rotated out; older livestock are culled and butchered; and the algae and yeast tanks are drained, sanitized, and recultured. This effectively makes Feaster an anomalous early spring harvest festival, but in a place with no natural seasons. Many of the microgravity crop varieties grow much longer (both in length and in time) than their terrestrial counterparts, being unrestrained by gravity, and are continuously harvested from lateral shoots and just under the apical meristem. Crops such as lettuce and Brassicas have exceptionally sturdy, long "canes" and are used to make Easter brooms.

While Easter brooms are technically a tool, most of them are a symbolic decoration elaborately adorned with ribbons and flowers. They are traditionally given out to citizens as a reward for service, and particularly nasty maintenance tasks often give out proportionally fancier brooms. Households will often hang them on the front door or windows, one for each resident or each task completed. The fancier and more numerous the brooms, the better the bragging rights.

Compulsory maintenance weeks have their root in Nexus Jovia's history as a small mining station. Even as its population ballooned into the millions and it expanded to over a hundred km wide, the ethos of the little station has carried forward: the only thing keeping a space habitat from killing its inhabitants is continual maintenance by its inhabitants. April Maintenance Week's closeness to Easter was originally a coincidence, but after chabbits, (a GMO pet that lays colorful eggs) were introduced and popularized as a space livestock, the two became linked in practice. In modern Jovia, chabbits are a staple livestock prized for their eggs, meat, and manure. Easter Feast is usually not considered complete without whole roasted chabbit at the center of the table.

The second maintenance week is Fall Fixing Week, which begins on the first Monday of October and is concerned with the maintenance of electrical systems and infrastructure of the space station. Local scheduled power outages happen throughout the week as systems are checked and updated and the last day of the week is a celebration called Allnighter. It has a very short day cycle followed by a long night with lightshows, street carnivals, dancing, and costuming. Fewer people travel to Jovia for this event but it is quite popular locally, with different habitat cylinders within Jovia showcasing their infrastructure through flashy light effects and drone air shows.

Jovian Quarters:

New Years on the Solar Year is a minor celebration, as is the Martian New Year. But these are mostly usurped by the "Jovian Quarters," which are the Perihelion, Vernal Equinox, Autumnal Equinox, and New Year (Aphelion). Jupiter completes an orbit of Sol every 11.862 Earth years, so these celebrations occur about every 3 years on the Solar Calendar. The perihelion and equinoxes are major celebrations, but usually pale in comparison to the aphelion celebration. Traditional celebrations for the Jovian Quarters involve giving presents to family and coworkers and decorating with helium balloons, helium being one of the major exports of Jovia's gas mining industry. The balloons are sometimes patterned to look like Jupiter and its moons. Jovian years are often given unofficial names by popular news outlets and one’s Jovian year of birth is treated something like a generational cohort, or by some, as a horoscope. Jovian astrology ascribes different personalities to people born in different seasons and different fates to people born in different years.

Independence Day:

Jovian Independence Day occurs on August 7th of the Gregorian calendar, the day that Jovia officially broke away from the Martian Free States in 2140. There are some arguments that it should take place on the equivalent day of the Jovian year, but most agree that using the Terran date is a way of honoring the assistance Jovia received from the allied Terran nations during the war. Besides, Jupiter’s year is almost 12 Earth years. Most humans prefer to celebrate holidays more than once a decade.

Independence Day celebrations usually involve putting the Jovian flag and colors all over everything, flying helium balloons, firing air cannons, and eating a lot of deep fried algae and yeast products in remembrance of the station’s subsistence off of these spacer staples during the war. The air cannons are usually fired at noon, then again after 41 and half minutes, representing the time lag it took for the declaration message to travel 5.01 AU to Mars in the pre-wormhole days. The festivities are said to officially begin after the second cannon blast.

NB4 I get asked about it:

Christmas is minor religious holiday and rarely celebrated by Jovians who don't practice the Christian faith.