Accessing the Custom Fields on Custom Taxonomies

I have created a custom taxonomy called Occasions, and I have added custom fields including “holiday_date.”

I want to be able to return Occasions that are “current” based on today’s date. I have tried a few different methods, but WP doesn’t seem to acknowledge my meta data request. I can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong.

Here are the two methods I have tried.

This one comes back empty/null

$meta_args['meta_query'] = array(
				array(
					'key' => 'merch_start_date',
					'value' => $today,
					'type'	=> 'DATE',
					'compare' => '<='
				),
				array(
					'key' => 'holiday_date',
					'value' => $today,
					'type'	=> 'DATE',
					'compare' => '<='
				)
			);

		$meta_query = new WP_Meta_Query( $meta_query_args );

And this one ignores the meta_query entirely…

$args = array(
        'orderby'       => 'name',
        'order'         => 'ASC',
        'hide_empty'    => true,
        'exclude'       => array(),
        'exclude_tree'  => array(),
        'include'       => array(),
        'number'        => '',
        'fields'        => 'all',
        'slug'          => '',
        'parent'         => 0,
        'hierarchical'  => true,
        'child_of'      => 0,
        'get'           => '',
        'name__like'    => '',
        'pad_counts'    => false,
        'offset'        => '',
        'search'        => '',
        'cache_domain'  => 'core'
    ); 

   $args['meta_query'] = array(
				array(
					'key' => 'merch_start_date',
					'value' => $today,
					'type'	=> 'DATE',
					'compare' => '<='
				),
				array(
					'key' => 'holiday_date',
					'value' => $today,
					'type'	=> 'DATE',
					'compare' => '<='
				)
			);

	$taxonomy_subs = get_terms( $taxonomy, $args );

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