Ok I'm loving this worldbuilding wave these asks have brought. Anyways could you please tell us about the holidays in your version of the magical dimension and how Alfea deals with them in terms of days off?
Magics doesn’t actually have a lot of holidays and those that they do observe all center around their creation myth and core faith.
THE big one that happens every year is their Creation Day celebration, commemorating the creation of their planet from a lifeless asteroid by h’Agia, mother of all nymphs. It is a two day celebration that coincides with the start of the year for this very reason. Everything is shut down for those days and there are only the festivities run by volunteers.
Other than that they have a cosmic event turned into holidays that returns every six years once the planet is in position again to delight in the glittering shower of meteros passing by daylight as a distant nebula obscures their sun briefly.
Because these are a staggeringly few cultural days, off the Magics Council also just made the executive decision to allow each month to have one three day long weekend to promote rest and recuperation of the working people.
So all in all Magics has 14 (+1 every six years) national bank holidays, which impacts the school term times very little. All four schools (yes Betta included) start in October and run three terms of three months with one month break in between each. So it would be October to December, February to April, and June to August. The weather is very moderate, so they’re not to sweaty in those summer months and neither too cold in the winter ones.
For religious and cultural celebrations the students want to observe back home with their family they will need to apply for days off. Alfea keeps a very detailed calendar (curtesy of Griselda) on all the holidays of the Magic Universe for this purpose. The applications are almost always immediately granted, Griselda just checks if friends aren’t fibbing to get out of deadlines together. The days missed can be made up for easily and the generous holidays between terms allow the teachers to be flexible with deadlines and exams for people who had big cultural events happen just before the end of term.
Those students who can’t travel home for monetary or visa reasons for every single holiday that is dear to them, the City Council actually has programs arranged in collaboration with all the schools. Students of the same faith and interested visitors are welcome to share the experience, hear other people’s stories and share what is dear to their culture.
Musa for example had to stay on planet during many of Melody’s celestial equinoxes because of exams (she is a high achiever she did not want to do them during resits and fall out of synch with the rest of her friends) so she ended up banding together with the other kids from Melody (and later Galatea who joined having to make a political gesture, but stayed because of her friendship to Musa) for these.