I still remember the year I needed to pop into Walgreen’s on December 26th to collect a prescription. Near the checkstands, some poor minimum-wage worker was dismantling the storewide Christmas decorations, while mere steps behind her, another worker was unpacking and assembling the Valentine’s Day bunting. I had to laugh out loud, because the alternative, giving into despair, seemed a little too close to home.
In the moment, I had the usual Middle-Aged White Guy responses: should I tell this corporate behemoth that Christmas lasts until January 6th? Or should I offer a snide comment about how American consumers feel compelled to seek another opportunity to spend money? Aging honkies like me love criticising commercialism, especially when holiday decorations are already out. It makes us feel righteous and vindicated.
The longer I marinate with that experience, though, the more I doubt my initial reaction. If one store caromed quickly from one holiday to another, that’d be a sketchy commercial decision. When every retailer, advertizer, mall, and website is already pumping us for another pan-cultural buying fest, that indicates something’s gone systemically cockeyed. It forces me to wonder who holidays are actually for.
It doesn’t take a degree in complex etymology to recognize that “holiday” is a portmanteau of “holy day,” and that’s what role holidays originally played. German theologian Rudolf Otto writes that calling something holy, rather than conveying moral purity and goodness, originally represented being set apart and different. Being holy meant being separate from this world, and its workaday pressures, whether that meant God’s separateness, land unmeet for walking on, or a day set aside.
That’s what holidays were, too: days set aside from tedium, obligation, and this world’s well-compensated march toward death. In a pre-technological society, the things that make life, like work, food, and children, are also reminders of impending mortality; being alive entails preparing for death. So pre-technological people scheduled separate time intended to celebrate being alive, acknowledging our existence matters while we’re here.
Sometimes, these celebrations were communal. Many prominent holidays on the Western calendar, like Christmas and Easter, were celebrated in unison throughout Christendom: every observant Christian knew every other observant Christian was also saying Easter prayers at the same moment as themselves. Other holidays, like July 4th or Bastille Day, represented only one nation, region, or population—but, importantly, that entire nation, region, or population together.
Other holidays were personal. To this day, Roman Catholic tradition preserves the practice of Saint’s Days, when people celebrate particularly holy persons whose influence the individual hopes to emulate. Baptism and naming days also once loomed large in Christian tradition. Other private holidays have applied in other religions or cultures, including periods of personal spiritual quests, or anniversaries of important accomplishments. Everyone had days which were entirely their own.
Not anymore. For most people, the only personal holidays remaining are your birthday and your wedding anniversary, and these have no cultural standing: if hourly wage earners schedule their birthday off, they’re vulnerable to mockery. You’re only entitled, anymore, to whatever holidays everyone else celebrates communally. Whether religious holidays like Christmas or Eid, or national holidays like May Day or the monarch’s birthday, all celebrations are communal, and scheduled.
Put another way, you only have programmed calendar opportunities to exist for yourself and your spiritual beliefs. Every other day, you’re required to exist for your country and your employer: work at required times, return home to the unpaid labor of raising a family, and sleep when every other obligation allows. The current system—call it capitalism, statism, or whatever—coördinates time to work, time to sleep, and time when you’re allowed to be happy.
And that happiness better be communal, or it’s deemed illegitimate.
Walgreen’s wasn’t demeaning Christmas or Valentine’s Day by rushing from one set of precut bunting to another. They merely acknowledged the collective schedule by which we, and they, are permitted to be happy. Our society reserves specific days, at scheduled intervals, to exist as “holy,” as set apart from public economic expectations. We live regimented lives, and only when authority gives permission may we do something reckless, like be happy.
Perhaps, in today’s socioeconomic system, one of our remaining acts of rebellion is to feel happy off-schedule. I don’t know how to accomplish that, how to simply enjoy living with the sun on my face like I did in elementary school. But I’ll be looking into that immediately. Because if happiness has become countercultural, baby, I want to be the happiest man alive.
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