An Introduction to Christian Festivals

The regular cycle of the Church's Year shapes a primary school's collective worship plans and also it's RE curriculum.

Festivals are an important window into the life of a believing community. They tell us what a faith community sees as important, because at the core of every festival celebration is a key faith story. These faith stories, in turn, point us to the beliefs, values and hopes of the believers, which are a living part of the faith today. Thus in Christianity you would expect the major festivals to give us an insight into Christian beliefs about God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, and also into the way Christians live their lives because of their faith.

You can tell immediately that the Church’s Year is ordered so as to tell the story of the Christian Faith. It begins with the season of Advent, at the very end of November, which is a period of preparation for the coming of Christ, and then moves through the story of his life to the important focus of Holy Week and Easter. After celebrating the resurrection of Jesus, the story becomes that of the founding of the Church itself, with the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, before settling down for a period of teaching and consolidation of the faith during the weeks of Trinity.

One trap that an unwary RE teacher may fall into is to think of festivals only in terms of telling a story and enjoying the celebrations. This sells the festival short! Questions need to be asked of the festival in order to understand the significance it holds for Christians: What is important about the event which is being celebrated and why is it remembered? What are the central Christian teachings that it conveys? What difference has it made, and continues to make, to the way people live their lives?

Festivals are a part of the natural human desire to celebrate, and so the traditional Christian festivals retain their hold upon our national consciousness, even in families where there is no Christian faith. Part of the task of RE, therefore, is to help pupils distinguish between the Christian heart of a festival and the secular additions (some of them very ancient) which now adhere to it. In many of the pupils’ home lives it may be only these secular additions that have any importance! ("Where are my Christmas presents?" "I like chocolate Easter eggs!")

In order to remind us of the important elements of each Christian festival covered in this booklet, the website includes summary pages which point out the key features of the festival under five headings:

1. Relevant Bible references
2. "The Christian Story" – a brief outline of the core of the festival
3. "The Beliefs" – the central Christian teachings conveyed by the festival
4. "The Christian Experience" - what it means in the life of a Christian believer and the faith responses it evokes
5. "The Customs" – a pointer to some of the most common festive customs, their origin and meaning.

Planning to Teach Christian Festivals

When planning to teach Christian Festivals, several questions need to be asked. Key amongst these are:

How do we develop progression over the primary phase when we have to teach the same festival every year? How different is Christmas in Y6 from what is happening in Y1?

Does every Christian festival have to be taught every year?

Which festivals should appear in the primary RE curriculum? Is the answer to this question different in church schools and community schools?

Here are some of our answers:

Progression is obviously crucial! When a festival appears every year in the RE planning you will still need to retell the story (after all the Church does the same!) but it is also important to bring on pupils’ thinking and understanding of its meaning. We have provided seven schemes for teaching Christmas, Epiphany and Easter, one for each year group, to demonstrate this progression. However, bearing in mind that many schools have mixed year groups, and that obviously these sessions will be a calendar year apart, and memories a little hazy (!) the schemes have been devised so as to be to some extent interchangeable. However, progression in understanding over the primary phase is guaranteed!

There is no need to teach every Christian festival every year. The two central festivals of Easter and Christmas should appear in the cycle annually, but Harvest Festival, for example, is not a central Christian festival and there is no need for it to appear in the RE curriculum on an annual basis. (Although it may well appear in the collective worship cycle annually, according to the custom of the school.) When writing these schemes we have considered carefully how many times it would be appropriate for a festival to appear in the primary phase and have written the appropriate number of schemes accordingly. This may be once or twice in a key stage. These schemes include an indication of the year group for which they were written, but are flexible enough to be adapted for other years where planning dictates this.

Church schools, especially Voluntary Aided schools where the governors control the RE Syllabus, should feature more Christianity in their RE teaching than the statutory 51% indicated by the Agreed Syllabus. For these schools some of the less well-known festivals are included in these materials – e.g. Candlemas. Community schools may not wish to use these materials.

Each scheme meets some of the objectives of the Agreed Syllabus and these have been indicated on the scehmes as "links". The schemes have not been written to fit neatly into the non-statutory guidance that accompanies the Agreed Syllabus, or the QCA materials, as not all schools use these in the same way or with the same year groups, especially at KS2. It may happen that a Christian festival scheme will fortuitously fit into the work you are doing in RE the rest of that half term (e.g. Church Visit), at other times it will not fit at all (e.g. Hindu worship)! Consequently the schemes in this booklet have been written, and should be regarded as, “stand-alone”, to be used at the appropriate time of the Christian Year. In order to help pupils link these together in their understanding, you could create a booklet of Christian festivals, separate from your other RE topic work, or collect the festival work at the back of an RE book so that it is not muddled in with unrelated RE topics.