Fiestas Patronales de Santo Tomas

Santo Tomas, a small San Salvador department district, honors Santo Tomas Apostol, the Apostle Thomas, keeping the pre-1969 traditional date of December 21 rather than the reformed universal July 3 feast. Fiestas run roughly December 10-21, in a district whose economy includes sugarcane byproducts, wooden furniture, and fireworks manufacturing.

Santo Tomas, a small district within the greater San Salvador area, preserves a detail of liturgical history that many larger Salvadoran towns have let lapse: rather than observing the Apostle Thomas's feast on July 3, the date fixed by the Catholic Church's 1969 liturgical calendar reform, the town keeps the older, pre-reform date of December 21, the traditional day on which Western Christianity had marked Saint Thomas's feast for centuries before that twentieth-century change.