Today@Dal

February 1
Vasant Panchami (HI)
Vasant Panchami is a famous Hindu festival that marks the end of the winter season and ushers in the springtime. “Vasanta” means “the spring.”
Sarasvati is the Hindu goddess of the Vasant Panchami festival. Young girls wear bright yellow dresses and participate in the festivities. The color yellow holds a special meaning for this celebration as it signifies the brilliance of nature and the vibrancy of life. The whole place bursts with yellow during the festival.

St Brigid’s Day
Also called Imbolc or Imbolg. The feast day of Saint Brigid, the years’s first sacred holiday, marking the beginning of Spring. The Bogha Bríde or Brigid’s Day Cross is the symbol of the day. Traditionally, reeds or straw are collected from the fields and crafted into a cross. St Brigid is Ireland’s most celebrated female saint and was the Abbess of one of the first convents in Ireland.

February 1-7
World Interfaith Harmony Week (UN)
The World Interfaith Harmony Week was first proposed at the UN General Assembly on September 23, 2010 by H.M. King Abdullah II of Jordan. Just under a month later, on October 20, 2010, it was unanimously adopted by the UN and henceforth the first week of February will be observed as a World Interfaith Harmony Week. The Week provides a platform when all interfaith groups can become aware of each other and strengthen the movement by building ties. I

February 3
Setsunbun-sai (SH)
The name literally means "seasonal division," Setsunbun-sai marks the end of winter and the eve of the first day of spring according to the ancient East Asian solar calendar familiar to the Japanese. Beans are thrown into each room of the house, and then through the outer doors, with the shout, "Devils out, fortune in.”

February 4
Rosa Parks Day
Rosa Louise McCauley Parks was an African American civil rights activist whom the U.S. Congress later called “Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement.” On December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James Blake’s order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger. Her action was not the first of its kind: Irene Morgan, in 1946, and Sarah Louise Keys, in 1955, had won rulings before the Supreme Court and the Interstate Commerce Commission respectively in the area of interstate bus travel. But unlike these previous individual actions of civil disobedience, Parks’ action sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. This movement turned Parks into an international icon of resistance to racial segregation and launched boycott leader Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence in the civil rights movement.

February 5 – 11
White Cane Week (CDN)
Held annually White Cane Week is to create awareness of issues that confront the blind and vision impaired community, but just as important, it demonstrate to others as well as themselves ability over disability. Since 1946 the first week of February has traditionally been "White Cane Week" in Canada, due to the CCB’s initiative.

February 7
Mulk (BA)
The eighteenth month of the Baha’i year.

February 10
Tu B'Shevat (JU)
Tu Bishvat (or Tu B'Shevat) is a minor Jewish holiday in the Hebrew month of Shivat, usually sometime in late January or early February that marks the "New Year of the Trees. Tu Bishvat is one of four "New Year’s" mentioned in the Mishnah. Customs include planting trees and eating dried fruits and nuts, especially figs, dates, raisins, carob, and almonds.

February 11
James R. Johnston Chair in Black Canadian Studies approved 1991 (DAL)
James Robinson Johnston, 1876-1915, was the first Nova Scotian of African descent to graduate in the Law Faculty at Dalhousie University. He rose to become a prominent lawyer in the province and a leading humanitarian.