🧹🌸 Happy Feaster! 🌸🧹
One of most influential national holidays in Jovia is Feaster, aka "Easter Feast." It is descended from the Christian holiday Easter, though it does not always fall on the same Sunday of the Terran solar calendar. Jovia's Christian minorities (mostly congregants of the Martian Church of Christ or Presbyterians) sometimes celebrate it as a religious holiday, but 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, and there is generally a scramble in the week before as signups open and citizens try to get slots in some of the less exhausting or gross jobs. Easter Feast occurs on the final day of the week, and is a welcome break after the toil of the previous 6 days. Many people with family on the Jovian system will travel to see them for Feaster, and Nexus Jovia is at its most crowded during this Spring holiday season.
Perhaps the most important part of Spring Cleaning Week is the rotating out of the microgravity farms. Old crops are harvested on mass and replanted, 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 these are technically a tool, most are a symbolic decoration for the holiday and elaborately adorned with ribbons and flowers. Households will often hang them on the door or over windows at their residence, as a representation of their service for the station. Particularly nasty maintenance tasks often give out fancy decorative brooms, molded metal or myla collectables, and other trinkets as a reward to citizens willing to undertake them. These prizes are often prominently displayed by those who receive them, for bragging rights.
Compulsory maintenance weeks have their root in Nexus Jovia's history as a small mining and research space station. Even as its population ballooned into the millions and it expanded to over a hundred kilometers wide, the ethos of the little station has carried forward: the only thing keeping a space station from killing its inhabitants is continual maintenance by its inhabitants. April Maintenance Week's nearness to Easter was originally a coincidence, but after chabbits, (also known as "Easter bunnies," a GMO pet that lays colorful eggs) were introduced and popularized as a space livestock, the two became associated. In modern Jovia, chabbits are a staple livestock prized for their eggs, meat, and manure. For many Jovians, Easter Feast is not complete without whole grilled chabbit at the center of the table.
