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:
“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover in their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“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)