Before this year's EPC meeting, we got a question about Matariki, the Māori New Year and a New Zealand public holiday since 2022. The DDC has 394.2614 New Year under "Holidays of December, January, February". Many New Year celebrations indeed take part in that time frame, but Matariki doesn't: it comes in late June or early July. That means the right number for it is 394.263, and the successful EPC proposal made that explicit.
The proposal also raised the question of how to deal with similar cases, where the same thing is celebrated at different times in different places or by different cultures. Before the change, it wasn't entirely clear whether 394.2614 was supposed to be limited to Gregorian-calendar New Year or could cover any New Year celebration in the December-February range. We settled on the broader interpretation, which also encompasses celebrations like Lunar New Year (often called Chinese New Year). We also added a scatter class-elsewhere note to call out New Year celebrations that occur in different parts of the year, using Matariki as the example.
We also investigated some other holidays that might be in a similar situation, like Mothers Day or Thanksgiving. We didn't find many good examples, though. 394.2649 Thanksgiving works for both American and Canadian Thanksgiving, for example, since they both occur in September-November. But there wasn't much literature on general thanks-giving holidays during other parts of the year.
Could Matariki get its own number under 394.263? Theoretically, yes, if there's enough literature on it. But there are quite a lot of holidays around the world to account for. There are at least 30 other holidays indexed to 394.263. We'll probably want to be careful, then, and mostly stick to holidays that are celebrated in multiple countries. Día de los Muertos, from our in-progress proposals, is closely associated with Mexico, but isn't only celebrated there, and there's a good amount of literature on it, so it seems to pass the bar, but I'd expect a lot of holidays to just class in their appropriate three-month span.
