Considering that today is for many superstitious people day of mock funeral festival, why not remember one that was big in the ancient world and that is Adonia. It was also probably set in the early spring and here's some description from wikipedia how it went on
Here's a bit of a description of Adonia from a historical novel "The Last Of The Wine"
Quote:Adonia was a festival celebrated annually by women in ancient Greece to mourn the death of Adonis, the consort of Aphrodite.
Unlike these other festivals, however, the Adonia was not state-organised, or part of the official state calendar of religious celebration, and prostitutes as well as respectable women celebrated the Adonia.
Over the course of the festival, Athenian women took to the rooftops of their houses. They danced, sang, and ritually mourned the death of Adonis. They planted "Gardens of Adonis" – lettuce and fennel seeds, planted in potsherds – which sprouted before withering and dying. After the rooftop celebrations, the women descended to the streets with these Gardens of Adonis, and small images of the god; they then conducted a mock funeral procession, before ritually burying the images and the remains of the gardens at sea or in springs.
Outside of Athens, a celebration of Adonis
was a cult with state patronage. It included an annual competition between women singing dirges for Adonis. Rites lamenting the death of Adonis are also attested in Argos in the second century AD: the Greek geographer Pausanias describes the women of Argos mourning Adonis' death at a shrine inside the temple of Zeus Soter.
Here's a bit of a description of Adonia from a historical novel "The Last Of The Wine"
Quote:adonis was dead. My mother put on her mourning veil and went out to weep for him, with a basket of anemones to strew about his bier. Soon one met a procession at every corner, the dead god carried in his garden, the women with hair unbound wailing against the flutes.
I have never met a man yet who liked this festival. That year it was a cold grey day, with heavy cloud. The citizens crowded into the palaestra and the baths and any place where women cannot go, and muttered gossip about omens and prodigies. Word came from the Agora that a man had just gone raving mad there; he had leaped on the Altar of the Twelve, drawn a knife, and hacked off his genitals with it. The altar was defiled and would have to be consecrated again.
