Orientation
Holiday theming can be approached as a visual communication problem: identify the social moment, viewing scale, material vocabulary, signal density, and level of cultural specificity before choosing motifs.
A holiday theme in this universe is a coordinated visual system that marks a recurring or exceptional social time through composition, material, color, light, objects, movement, or symbols.
That is a design framework created for this release, not a dictionary definition or claim of consensus.
It does not rank holidays, assign universal meanings to colors or symbols, reproduce sacred iconography as generic decoration, or claim that every holiday is celebratory, family-centered, religious, secular, commercial, or public.
Vocabulary
These dimensions recur across the Atlas, Compare view, Composition Lab, and Interaction Playground.
The repeated cue: light, botanical form, paper/craft, table/object grouping, textile, geometry, movement, or other material language.
How much visual information is present, from one focal marker to an abundant field.
Whether the system must read at hand, table, room, storefront, street, or civic distance.
What is primary, secondary, and background—especially when several signal families coexist.
Quiet, intimate, communal, or spectacle-facing; not a judgment of importance, but a design condition.
How much the design depends on tradition-specific symbols, materials, scripts, rituals, or meanings that require context and sourcing.
