I thought Frigga and Freya were essentially the same goddess; like Aphrodite and Venus.
ETA: Sorry. You wrote Freyr. I’m not aware of a connection between him and the day of the week.
Just a week or so from watching our annual viewing of the totally-not-a-Christmas-film Holiday Inn, and I always chuckle that there is nothing “Holiday-y” in the film between Easter and the 4th of July, and then nothing to Thanksgiving.
Story-wise, it makes sense to eliminate them, because the film would be too long and it would have to deal with the whole “Linda leaves to go to Hollywood” plot earlier in the year, but it hints that summer really has no holidays.
Why do all of them have to be bunched up? We already had Valentines day store displays on the 26th fer cripes sake!
Freya was his sister
Everyone has some sort of spring equinox festival, but in addition to pagans Easter was also an attempt to co-opt the Jewish Passover holiday. This is why, like Jewish holidays but unlike other Christian holidays, its date is based on the lunar cycle, so it falls on a different day each year by the Gregorian calendar.
On a related note, religious Christians have a tradition of parading around with palm fronds the Sunday before Easter, “Palm Sunday”. This is because their Scriptures report that people were running around waving palm fronds when he arrived in Jerusalem…which is a thing that Jews do for the FALL holiday of Sukkot. The obvious inference is that he saw the palm fronds on some previous visit to Jerusalem, but for some reason I don’t know the Christians felt they couldn’t interpret it that way, so now they do it in the spring.
Also, Labor Day was invented as an alternative to the socialist holiday May Day (which they also kinda co-opted from the Christians, who got it from the pagans…). Today it’s like an even more laid back Fourth of July, where you don’t even have to organize yourself to go see fireworks, definitely not a celebration of the working class.
You probably know that the inventor of Mother’s Day intended it to be primarily celebrated by pacifist demonstrations. That didn’t quite work out.
In Chicago (or Illinois? Not sure), Columbus Day has been changed to Indigenous People’s Day, which has also provoked accusations of wokeness.
But yeah, the real “meaning” of the holiday is that, at some time in the past, a previously discriminated-against immigrant group achieved enough political power to flex their muscles by putting new stuff on the calendar. Very similar to St. Patrick’s Day, though that never made the official government list. In Chicago, we have a unique holiday just for the Poles, where the schools close and everything. It’s called Pulaski Day, after some general from the Revolution…I would have gone with Copernicus but whatever.
I’m totally okay with people celebrating a secular Christmas, having it be all about the gift-giving and Christmas trees and Santa and stockings and so on. I love all those things too.
On the other hand, as a music person, one of my favorite things about Christmas is Christmas carols, and I was a bit sad to find that my niece and nephew did not know any of the classic Christmas carols, and when I taught a couple of them to them, they didn’t get them at all because they didn’t know anything about the story of Christmas. They did, in contrast, know the story of Hanukkah! So I did tell them (with their parents’ permission, of course!) the story of Christmas.
I’m not saying that other people need to do it that way. But it’s interesting that to me personally, Christmas is so very bound up in music in a way that no other holiday is, in a way which (again, just to me personally) necessitates some familiarity with the story. Also interestingly, I also commit to a lot of musical stuff during Easter, but in my brain music is not an essential part of Easter the way that it is for Christmas.
I love Christmas Carols too, especially the old-school religious ones. I find them incredibly moving.