December 11, 2012
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Holiday stress
JDN 2456274 EDT 19:43.
There’s no doubt about it: Holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving are stressful for many people. We are constantly bombarded with people complaining about how much work it is to decorate, and get the family together, prepare food, and buy gifts.
Apparently something never occurs to people: We wouldn’t have to do this. We choose to have holidays. This is particularly true in a secular society.
In fact, I think that holidays are a good thing. We all need time to relax, time when we aren’t constantly expected to work. We should take time to remind ourselves of the good things in our lives and celebrate them. Gifts and food can bring families and even whole societies together. But if it’s not working… don’t do it! If you feel worse after Christmas than you did before, don’t celebrate Christmas. And if you choose to celebrate Christmas, you should be doing it because it makes your stress level lower, not higher.
I think honestly this option simply doesn’t occur to most people. They see holidays as an obligation, like you’re somehow being a bad person if you don’t celebrate them. Well, once the holiday becomes work, something you must do instead of something you want to do, you’ve really defeated the entire purpose of having a holiday.
This attitude probably originally came from the time when holidays really were “holy days” and people actually believed that magical beings would punish them for failing to celebrate their birthdays. Hopefully people don’t still believe that… then again, maybe some of them do. The way Bill O’Reilly gets so angry when people say “Happy Holidays” (because, you know, there’s more than one holiday in this season, even for Christians; think New Year’s), it really does seem like he fears that the magical man in the sky will punish him for not saying the right words on the proper day.
Likewise, I’ve actually had my mother ask me: “What are you atheists celebrating on Christmas?” Doesn’t she know that the date of Christmas wasn’t set based on the birthdate of Jesus, but instead on the traditional date of Yule, the post-solstice celebration of pagan druids? You know, the reason we still say things like “Yuletide” and have a “Yule log” and cut down a tree? (The Bible actually explicitly forbids Yule trees: Jeremiah 10. This makes sense, seeing as they’re pagan.) Doesn’t she know that mistletoe comes from the celebration of Saturnalia (which also included orgies, maybe we should bring that back)? But no, I’m not celebrating Yule, and I’m not celebrating Jesus, and I’m not celebrating the solstice either for that matter (why would I celebrate axial tilt alignment?). I’m using this traditional festival to celebrate my family, remember the good things in my life, and share in the heritage of my culture. Isn’t that what you’re doing? Or did you really think that the creator of the universe cares how you celebrate his son’s birthday (whatever that means!)?
If so, this is very sad. I had hoped humanity had grown up at least enough to see that holidays are not about magical beings in the sky, but human beings on Earth. I had hoped that we had at least reached the point where the decorations and feasts weren’t done because we felt that superhuman entities demanded it, but because they make us happy and bring our families together.
But it certainly would explain why people feel so stressed about Christmas.
