For the most part, holidays are intended to be celebrations, happy and joyous times where we gather together and have a good time. There are some that are more somber, days of remembrance more than celebrations, but even those have started becoming reasons to party for many people.
Many people are also learning that what they thought they knew about holidays, and the roots that they grew from, just isn't accurate. Some of the holidays that we use to celebrate noble ideals, are actually built on lies and misinformation.
Part of the problem is that many holidays, and the traditions we associate with them, are ingrained in us from childhood. When we were little, we didn't understand all of what a holiday meant, and we definitely didn't know that there might be more sinister aspects to them. All we knew is that holidays meant parties at school, special activities (no regular classes!) and the best holidays meant no school at all. We were taught super clean, upbeat versions of what the holidays meant, and of course these focused on the positive, and so that is what we associated holidays with.
Thanksgiving is a great example. There is a commonly told story of how the Pilgrims and Indians sat down to a happy dinner together, how the Indians shared the bounty of their harvest, and helped the Pilgrims make it through the harsh winters.
As many people are now aware, the actual history just didn't go that way. The interactions between the Pilgrims and Indians was not the idyllic story we were told in grade school, and the fact that most of Thanksgiving imagery reinforces this farce makes celebrating it problematic for many people.
Now, I'm not going to go into a whole thing on the true story of Thanksgiving. My point is more on how do we deal with the potential issue of holidays that have troubled pasts? I don't think we need to stop celebrating Thanksgiving, but I do think that we also shouldn't just keep sweeping the truth under the rug.
Thanksgiving today is not about Pilgrims and Indians. Once you are out of school, you don't talk about that at Thanksgiving dinner. Thanksgiving today is about family, food, and often Football. It is a time to express gratitude, that is something that I think remained, but even that is something that is falling by the wayside. Many people have rocky relationships with their extended family, which makes big family dinners less than pleasant, and when you add in the fact that a lot of us have moved away from the place we lived as a child, and our families are spread across the country (if not globe), even the basic big family dinner is fading away.
I think we all need to find our own peace with the holidays we celebrate, in any fashion. I do think we need to talk about the origins of the things we do, and think about how we are teaching these traditions to future generations.
If history has taught us anything it is that times and attitudes change. Things that were acceptable in the past, are no longer tolerated, and so holiday origins and activities that might have been okay in some other place and time might need to be reevaluated.
I do think that holidays can evolve though. We have seen this! If you look at how a holiday was celebrated a hundred years ago, many people would be surprised. We tend to think that how things were when we were little is how they have always been, but every generation adds their own small change to things, and over the years this adds up. Not to mention that sometimes, big global issues will cause changes (like when there is a war or natural disaster, and people have to adjust).
I think the best thing we can do, is to explore our holidays. Look at how they started, and look at how we have celebrated them over the years. Don't take holidays on blind faith, and don't rely upon your memories of childhood (tinged with childhood's natural blinders) for what they mean.
But I also feel like we can explore the themes behind the holidays, we can find new ways of expressing them...ways that work for our current time and culture. We are poised in a place where techology is progressing so fast, and people are teetering on the brink of either embracing the new and rushing forward with both arms open and pulling back, clutching the old ways and refusing to change. Progress, however is somewhat inevitable, and it is highly likely that things will keep ticking forward, no matter how we personally feel about them.
Taking time to sit and really delve into our relationship with a holiday and how it fits in our lives allows us to pull back the blinders and find healthy ways to honor the meaning of them. For Thanksgiving this may mean spending more time thinking about our relationships with our family, possibly expanding our definition of family (blood isn't the only family you have, in my book). It may mean thinking about how we can open our eyes to the ways in which we remember history, and how we tend to accept the accounts of the 'winners' of any situation....and maybe even seek out the stories of those who lost, so we can have a more complete picture of what actually went on.
I think that examining history gives us the power to choose how we move forward, instead of just following along the path that has been charted for us. And reclaiming our holidays so that they are truly meaningful to us, in ways that empower our lives and give us tools to honoring the things that are important to us, is a way to use the lessons of history to grow, instead of being trapped by it.
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