In any country, the civil calendar is the calendar, or possibly one of several calendars, used within that country for civil, official or administrative purposes. The civil calendar is almost always used for general purposes by people and private organizations.
The most widespread civil calendar and de facto international standard is the Gregorian calendar. Though that calendar is associated with the Catholic Church and the papacy, it has been adopted, as a matter of convenience, by many secular and non-Christian countries. Some countries have retained the older Julian calendar, while others use other calendars.
Commonly, another calendar, or more than one, is used alongside the civil calendar. For example, Christian Churches have their own calendars, which they use to compute the dates for their own festivals, though most of these dates are then expressed relative to the civil calendar. In Christian terminology these festivals are called movable feasts. Very few Christian festivals are fixed in relation to the civil calendar, the most notable one being Christmas.
The same applies to Jews and to Muslims, who have their own calendars for religious purposes, but whose religious occasions are then expressed in civil calendar dates.
Read more about Civil Calendar: Civil Calendars Worldwide
Famous quotes containing the words civil and/or calendar:
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“To divide one’s life by years is of course to tumble into a trap set by our own arithmetic. The calendar consents to carry on its dull wall-existence by the arbitrary timetables we have drawn up in consultation with those permanent commuters, Earth and Sun. But we, unlike trees, need grow no annual rings.”
—Clifton Fadiman (b. 1904)