53 festivals from all over the world – and why our game knows more than Christmas 🏮🌍

November 7, 2026

It started with a very small wish: more pumpkins should grow during Halloween week. Then Christmas, spring, summer and autumn joined in. And then we realised that Halloween and Christmas only show a small part of the world. Our game speaks 14 languages, from Japanese to Turkish to Portuguese, and kids everywhere celebrate very different festivals. So the pumpkin wish turned into a festival calendar with 53 festivals from all over the world by now. Here's how we chose them and what we paid attention to.

Every festival on its own, with its own explanation. We could have made it easy for ourselves and built one general "festival of lights" for winter. We didn't want to. Diwali, Hanukkah, St. Lucia's Day, Loy Krathong and St. Martin's Day all have to do with light, and yet they are very different festivals. That's why each one has its own place in the calendar, with a short explanation a child can understand: what people do and where they do it. One example: on St. Martin's Day, kids walk through the dark streets with home-made paper lanterns and sing lantern songs. Under the hood, festivals with a similar theme share their mood. There are eight of those: lights, harvest, stars, new year, blossoms, children, midsummer and colours.

What people do, not what they believe. Many of these festivals have religious roots. Even so, we only describe what you can see and join in with: lanterns, lights, harvest, blossoms, stars, eating together. No rites, no explanations of faith. That's not a side note but a firm rule: an automated test checks the texts. We looked especially closely at Día de los Muertos, because it is a cheerful, colourful festival of remembrance. In the game it brings warm colours, petals drifting through the air and cosy music, but no skeletons walking around. And our Halloween is cosy-spooky, never scary.

A space game celebrates space, too. A few festivals fit us especially well: Yuri's Night for the first human in space, Asteroid Day, Moon Landing Day, the Perseids with their shooting stars, and World Space Week in October. 🚀 There are also four children's days, among them Türkiye's on April 23, the oldest children's day in the world.

A calendar that doesn't rush you. Real-calendar festivals come with a danger we absolutely wanted to avoid: the classic "only three days left, then it's gone!". There's nothing like that in our game. The calendar only decides which festival comes on its own. In your own world you can switch on any festival whenever you like with /festival. The rewards are decoration only, and your progress is kept. You can't miss anything.

Less is more. To be honest, our first version was too much of a good thing: with 52 festivals, there was festive mood almost every other day, 163 days a year. That's why there is now My festivals. At first you celebrate the fourteen big festivals of the world plus the festivals of your language. If you want more, choose All festivals or press Celebrate next to a festival from somewhere else in the list and discover something new. The festive mood with lights, blossoms and a little festival tune now comes on the first days of a festival, throughout Halloween week and on the Advent Sundays. That makes about 40 festive days a year.

Calendars that follow the moon. Many festivals have no fixed date: Lunar New Year, Holi, Diwali, Hanukkah, Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr. We looked up these dates for the next few years and entered them, and a test reminds us every year to extend the list. For Eid there is a little uncertainty left, because the real day depends on when the new moon is sighted. The seasons in the game are something else, by the way: every planet with air has its own spring, summer, autumn and winter, independent of the calendar on Earth. 🍂

And soon a little door opens. Ben from our school club had the idea for an Advent calendar: from December 1, a new door opens every day, and if you miss one, you can catch up until January 6. We won't tell you here what's behind the doors. 🎄

Get involved: is that how you celebrate? We wrote English and German by hand; the other twelve languages were machine-translated and checked by someone who isn't a native speaker. That isn't enough for us. If you speak Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian or Chinese – or celebrate one of these festivals yourself – please read the festival texts in your language. Is the name right? Is that really how people celebrate it where you live? Does a sentence sound odd to a child? Is a festival missing? Just leave a comment on issue #3008. No programming needed: the festival's name and your better wording are enough. Thank you so much! 🙏