The traditional reckoning has six seasons, each of two months: Basant the spring, Grikham the hot weather, Varsha the rains, Sharad the autumn, Hemant the early winter and Shishir the cold.
In practice Punjab has three: a cold winter with fog, a very hot dry summer reaching the high forties, and a monsoon of two and a half months.
The agricultural year runs on the two crops rather than the six seasons, and the desi months are the working calendar.
Basant, in late January or February, is the mustard flowering and the kite festival, and yellow is worn for it.
The heat of May and June, before the monsoon breaks, is when the loo blows, a dry wind off the desert that can be lethal, and the traditional response was to stay inside behind wet screens of khas grass.
Punjab's climate is one of extremes and everything on this site, the crops, the buildings, the clothes, the food and the festivals, is an answer to it.
The six are basant, garmi, barsat, patjhar, sardi and sheet, and the Indian calendar's twelve months pair into them, which is the frame the barah maha uses.
The agricultural year has two: rabi sown in winter and cut in spring, and kharif sown in the monsoon and cut in autumn. Everything else in a village calendar hangs off those two.
The fairs sit at the joints. Lohri and Basant at the turn of winter, Vaisakhi at the wheat harvest, Teej in the monsoon, and the Diwali fairs after the kharif is in.