Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten older, or wiser, or maybe just more jaded, but it dawned on me the other day, that I can’t think of any holiday I celebrate where I actually feel like I’m celebrating anything. For the most part, holidays just feel like an excuse to spend more money than I actually have. There are truly only a few holidays I can think of that feel worth celebrating.

Now, these feelings aren’t from a vacuum. I don’t know about elsewhere, but at least here in America, every holiday is capitalized out the ass. They begin pushing Christmas merchandise in late October, Valentine’s Day merch will start in early January, if not immediately after Christmas. Generally, if you haven’t bought what you need for a holiday a month before it actually happens, you’ll miss out because the stores will already be changing over to the next holiday before the first one has even passed. To make my point, I’m going to pick a handful of holidays and make my case for each one.

Christmas

We’ll just get the big one out of the way. Short of Christians celebrating the birth of their saviour, what are the rest of us really doing? What are we actually celebrating? Outside of its religious purpose, Christmas really only serves to keep the major corporations in business for another year. Don’t get me wrong, I love giving people gifts, but there’s no reason I can’t do that all throughout the year. Why should I wait all year and rely on a system that bleeds me dry of my money just so I can feel good about giving people things I wanted to give them anyway? We’re not celebrating an end of the year harvest, that’s what Thanksgiving is for. We’re not celebrating the New Year, that comes the following week. We’re just appropriating the Christian saviour’s birth so we can use it as an excuse to spend way too much.

Labor Day

What a joke. Like, I vaguely get that it’s supposed to celebrate the efforts of the labor movements of the past (per the Wikipedia article, anyways). But the fact that the average working person, the cashiers, the baristas, the gas station employees, the very people that the labor movement should be helping, still have to work completely invalidates the holiday if you ask me.

Memorial Day & Veteran’s Day

I’d almost say that the problem with these two is really a top-down one. I can get behind taking a day to remember those who fell for the country, and those who have served, (putting aside that, as far as I can recall, we haven’t been in a just war since WWII ended) but the way our government abuses our veterans makes the whole thing feel like a farce. You give us a day to parade them around and make them feel like maybe what they did was worth it, and the rest of the year you try to take away their benefits, and leave them homeless on the streets.

Independence Day

Again, what a joke. I’m sorry, I should be celebrating the celebrating the country that has taken to disappearing its citizens it doesn’t like? I should be celebrating the country that wants to erase my friends and loved ones because of who they are or who they love? I should celebrate the country that lets its people die because it’s better for the bottom line? I’ll take no part in that.

Holidays I Can Appreciate

Really, only one comes to mind, and that’d be Thanksgiving. It has been hyper-commercialized too, of course, but at least there’s still some tangible meaning still there. It’s not about gifts, it’s not even about having a lavish feast, but it’s just about being with the people you love and enjoying each other’s company. That’s nice! That’s a reason to celebrate! I suppose New Year’s is also a pretty good reason to celebrate too - in the same vein as birthdays.

I can kinda get behind Valentine’s Day. I know that it’s one of the most hyper-commercialized holidays, but I am a classic romantic. I like an excuse to make grand displays of affection for my partner. Yes, you should always be doing things to show your partner you appreciate them. Yes, you don’t need a commercial holiday to show your love, but this one I like, okay? That’s my bad.

Victory in Europe and Victory in Japan days are actually the closest to worth-while, country-based holidays we have, and those are barely even talked about. At least those are days in (semi-)recent history where something significant happened for our country. That said, I’m reasonably confident I could pick a random passer-by and wish them a happy Victory in Europe day, and they’d have no idea what I meant.

A Generational Problem

Following up on my comment on Victory in Europe day, I think that a large part of this problem comes from the fact that the further you get from a holiday’s creation, the more it loses meaning. It genuinely was not until right now as I’m writing this that I learned that Memorial Day started as a day to commemorate those lost to the American Civil War. I was going to make a point about how we don’t celebrate the end of that, but I guess in some way, we still do. It’s just that it’s been so long that it was co-opted for other, similar purposes.

To some degree I think September 11th is loosely thought of as a holiday in America because it was a momentous occasion, but as time passes more and more people are being born and growing up who weren’t there for 9/11 and so to them it’s just another day. It’s another Victory in Europe day or Memorial Day. It’s a celebration, but not for anything they can truly appreciate or understand.

Am I Just Disillusioned?

When you’re a kid, or at least when I was a kid, you hear stories of a kingdom or country that some great tragedy has fallen on. Then the hero comes along and saves everyone, and then there’s a big celebration. They have something to celebrate; the day was saved! They’ve been saved from some awful thing and they’re happy to be alive. That’s worth celebrating, I think. It’s then left to your imagination whether they continue to celebrate that day for years to come. To tell their kids the story of how they were saved, and why they now celebrate.

But I feel like, at least in the culture I’m stuck in, there is no reason to celebrate. So far, no hero has saved the day. We are in the dark days. During these dark days, the only thing worth celebrating seems to be that my friends, my loved ones, and I all made it through another day.

Please, I implore you to write your own blog post, or even just drop me a line at the email address below, if you feel otherwise. Please, why do you celebrate?