A holiday meal
Seems like we go directly from Halloween to Christmas without even a skip for Thanksgiving. Is a holiday an occasion or just a day off work? What is the purpose of a holiday? National Holidays have evolved over time from their original purpose and usually come on Monday to allow for a 3-day weekend.
When I was a kid, Halloween was trick or treat. But that’s become too dangerous and has been abandoned. “Monster” or “Death” houses seemingly rise for the grave and can really be scary, not just a little bit. Some people decorate for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and more people (except in the South) don’t decorate at all. Lights, blow-up plastic figures on the lawn, pumpkins, hay, are more popular now also for Thanksgiving. New England has everything but the blow-up figures because the fall is a big tourist season. The fall “color” season is also a big tourist draw in the North Carolina mountains, but I’ve never been able to pick the “peak weekend.”
Thanksgiving is football, whether it is in the stands or around the TV after a family feast. More people nowadays are stretching it into a 4-day holiday. Those days are also the busiest travel days of the year.
What about Christmas in July? Some businesses stage promotions then. The stores put up the decorations beginning the day after Halloween. Christmas has been the salvation of retail because of the decline in comparison with online shopping year-round. There are fewer “department” stores, so there are fewer decorations in the windows, because they don’t have any. There is just an entrance from the mall. To be more ethnically diverse, we now also celebrate Jewish and African holidays that occur about the same time. The Muslim equivalent of Christmas is Eid al-Fitr that marks the end of Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting. I don’t think they decorate. I know some Greek restaurants that leave up their Christmas decorations all year.
Holidays originally were celebrated as “Holy Days” or “Feast Days” in the Roman Catholic Church liturgical calendar. In the times when lots of people worked six or seven days a week, they really were special as days of rest as well as religious events. Now EVERYTHING is open all the time, 24 hours a day, except for Christmas Day. So much for technology being “labor-saving,” when it requires someone to feed the beast all the time. Automation still requires someone to push the button or sit at a computer.
Any day is a “holiday” when you have an opportunity to share a special meal with friends and family, especially when so many of us are scattered across the country. Sorry, but on these occasions Zoom just doesn’t cut it. We tried it for family gatherings, and it was a disappointing second choice.
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