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To have a festival or holiday, there seems to be a need for folklore or an event of significance that that culture deems worth of celebrating. With Esperanto, the people are very different and separated, so it's hard to point at one event and say "this is worthy of celebrating" other than days associated with Zamenhof himself.

I would personally like to see more holidays for Esperantists to celebrate, since I think that would attract more people to the language and would provide a stronger sense of camaraderie between ourselves. However, since this language is meant to be an international language, can celebrations be made?

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  • The reasoning behind this question is how enjoyable words such as aligatori and krokodili are for me, and this adds to the appeal of the language for me. However, what fascinates me with Spain is the odd and fascinating festivals they celebrate, with both their original ones and the unique ways of celebrating widely established ones, such as Christmas. I feel that if Esperanto had some of these unique traditions or customs, it would make the culture more appealing and fun for an Esperantist, while also exposing others to the language more.
    – Donĉjo Frazoro
    Commented Nov 7, 2016 at 20:07
  • A lot of holidays for Esperantists can be found here: eo.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto-festotagoj
    – Sir Cornflakes
    Commented May 2, 2018 at 18:12

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In addition to Zamenhof day, there's Ago Tago. I think some people celebrate the day the language was published. Then, of course, there are good solar holidays like New Years and the Fall Esperanto Gathering on Columbus Day. (Wink.)

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i appreciate your idea of wanting to develop a culture to make esperanto more attractive. but not everyone will be attracted to it because of the parties, it could also turn some people off.

i guess most of us want esperanto to appeal to everyone, and developing a new unique culture may or may not be the right approach to that. i could be wrong, but any culture has a tendency to attract only a subset of people (those who like that culture). this doesn't have to be bad, that subset could be just what is needed to spread esperanto to more people, or it could have the opposite effect.

i am not suggesting that inventing new holidays will make esperanto look strange. it's probably more like a sports club or some other activity that has developed their traditional events for whatever reason.

i guess my feeling is, that this won't make esperanto stand out to much, and it won't aappeal to people who don't like parties.

so instead i'd like to turn your suggestion around into a different one:

embrace local culture. think about who you want to attract to learn esperanto and adopt their holidays and celebrate them in esperanto.

an esperanto church service to invite your christian friends to.

an esperanto computer party, where you help everyone get proper esperanto language support on their computers. you can invite computer geeks to help with the technical issues while exposing them to this concept of the esperanto language.

celebrate the founding day of your city/country.

do social projects (like teaching esperanto to underprivileged people. (esperanto is so easy to learn, it will boost their self esteem and enable them to make friends worldwide which will help them to see a world beyond the local environment they are stuck in))

pretty much any event that your friends would go to, but with an added twist that it's done in esperanto.

the idea is that instead of inviting people to move to a new country and experience a new culture, show that esperanto can be part of their culture, that it can be used to help with local issues, and that they can learn it without changing anything else in their lives.

ni estas esperantoj. via kultura diferencigo estos aldonita al nia propra. rezisto estas vana.

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