As for the holidays being intune with nature: most of the people on this forum have a western background which is to say monotheistic in origin, one of the main aims of monotheism is to avert the worship of nature.
Well, I can't speak for all monotheistic religions, but Catholic Tradition at least splits the definition of "worship" into two parts: sacrificial worship,
latria, which is due to God alone, and non-sacrificial worship,
dulia, appreciation of--not service towards--created persons and things. In other words, things are a bit more complicated, and it's not fair to say that monotheists ignore nature entirely.
Pre christian European, pre-islamic Middle East and modern Asian festivals were/are in tune with nature. ...
Catholicism has four seasonal feasts that roughly coincide with the start of the seasons:
(northern-hemisphere)
Winter: Nativity of Our Lord ("Christmas," "Yule")
Spring: Paschal Triduum ("Easter")
Summer: Pentecost ("Whitsun")
Autumn: Christ the King (following the Second Vatican Council, also "Catholic New Year"--prior to that, Exultation of the Holy Cross / "Holyrood")
Pentecost is earlier than the solstice, and Easter always slightly later than its corresponding equinox. They move around so that the Paschal Triduum be commemorated for three nights under the first full moon of spring.
Yes, really. "Not in tune with nature" and all that.
As for the months being called things like 'wet month' and how undignified that is... well advanced cultures like the Japanese have flower month, water month, frost month etc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_calendar
Modern Japanese month names are boring things like "five-month" ("gogatsu") and "ten-month" ("juugatsu"). The older names are mostly limited to poetic use.
But, don't forget the days of the week. The seven day week derives from astrology: there are seven visible non-stellar objects: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn, in the classical order, the source of all sorts of modern silliness.
Thus, the classical Latin names of the weekdays are things like 'Day of Saturn."
Germans translated these names, substituting their gods for the Greco-Roman ones. English follows this pattern: "Sun-day," "Moon-day," "Tyr's-day," "Oden's-day," etc.
The Hebrew calendar numbers the weekdays: Day 1 through Day 6 and Sabbath Day. Christians renamed Day 1 the "Lord's Day" but otherwise kept the same pattern. Most European languages combine Christian names with the Roman ones: "Lord's-day, Moon-day, Mars-day, etc."
Greek astrology also migrated to China, where, like the Germans, the Chinese changed the system to fit their own names of the seven astronomical objects. The Chinese used names like "water star" for Mercury (Probably still do.
The Japanese do. This system reached Japan by the Heian era (roughly 1000 AD) and is
used today in Japan. (China now uses numbered weekdays. How boring.)
I think the andalite months would've originally been called after natural phenomena like for example 'month of Est flower' because the est flower only flowers in that month. ...
Or, they might not use months at all. Traditional Chinese and Japanese calendars divide the year into the
Twenty-Four Terms (Japanese "nijuu sekki") based on the Sun's position against the celestial sphere. This system existed alongside the lunisolar calendar and was especially useful for agriculture. Now, it's mostly for scheduling festivals and the like.