Holidays

The word holiday derives from the words holy day, and several of our annual holidays are based on Christian holy days. With the recent celebration of Easter, it got me thinking about these holidays.

Our principal Christian holidays are Christmas, Easter, St. Valentine’s Day and All Hallows Eve (Halloween).  The celebration of these days goes back to the early days of Christianity and the religious traditions for them are well established in our traditions. 

Islam and Judaism take the celebration of their holy days very seriously and their traditions too run deep. 

Our Christian holy days, on the other hand, are celebrated as a mixture of religious and pagan tradition.  Want a good example?  There were no such things as fir trees in Israel 2000 years ago. Unfortunately, for the religious among us, the pagan part of the tradition has become the more powerful and alluring.  Christmas is considered a success by the amount shoppers spend on gifts rather than how many people celebrate the birth of Jesus. One of my tree ornaments shows a harried woman lugging several shopping bags under the title, “Spirit of Christmas Stressed”.  Easter is celebrated with big family meals and by the state of the spring weather, rather than the remembrance of the crucifixion and resurrection.  St. Valentine’s Day and Halloween are about parties and candy.  And they are all dependent on the purchase and sending of cards. 

All of our holidays, both religious and otherwise, have now become associated with sporting events.  After all, you can’t have a perfectly good audience going off to thinking about their religious traditions when they can be distracted by a good basketball or football game.  And so at Christmas, it is National Basketball Association games.  At Thanksgiving, it is football, both Canadian and American.  New Year’s Day and many days before and after, it is US college football.  And at Easter it is often US college basketball (“March Madness”) and sometimes a golf tournament called the Masters where Amen consists of the 11^th, 12^th and 13^th holes at Augusta National Golf Course.

The trend, or should I say headlong rush, toward secularizing holy days is a shame because it masks the beauty and tranquility of the religious observance.  A midnight church service at Christmas with its solemn formality and the beautiful Christmas music can be a wonderful way of releasing the tension that the other aspects of Christmas inevitably cause.  A sunrise service on Easter Sunday can evoke the glory of the resurrection and spring like nothing else.  The secular side of the holiday traditions seem to be designed to cause stress and confusion.  The religious traditions of holy days usually result in tranquility of the soul and body.

So let’s try and bring more of the religious tradition back to our holidays/holy days and reignite the beauty and peace that these traditions can evoke.  Non-believers are advised not to celebrate any of these holy days in order to preserve their ideals.