Holidays can be a time fraught with all kinds of emotions, especially holidays like Thanksgiving that have a decidedly checkered past. But they can also hold a lot of nostalgia and fond childhood memories, and we often try to capture those emotions in our adult life.
Whether you have happy memories of a holiday or are simply feeling wistful for that 'family holiday' that other people's families seemed to have, you can seek out those emotions of family and celebration. We can take the holiday as a time to put aside our troubles and woes of the day and just allow ourselves to enjoy the simple happiness of honoring an idea together.
And I know there is a lot of misinformation around some holidays. They don't always represent the truth of what happened. And we absolutely should recognize this fact and work to educate ourselves on what actually happened.
But I truly feel that the heart of a holiday isn't as simple as the stories we tell ourselves. Especially when we have all these other emotions tied up into it. Holidays often represent the idea behind them more than the history, and for one like Thanksgiving, we can turn to the story for the idea (that we should be thankful for our bounty and we should share what we have with people who don't have the same blessings).
The thing is...life is complicated. So rarely is anything in life cut and dry, this or that...good or evil. Things are tricky and one holiday may have a whole bundle of emotions rolled up into it. We may remember some good years, and some bad years. We might have family fights to block out or that one year when we were completely alone, or maybe we lost someone around the holiday and now it makes us a little sad.
I feel like holidays are one of those times where we can hold space for the rough stuff, but focus on the good. We can recognize not only the issues there are with the first Thanksgiving story, acknowledge family drama, care for any trauma we might have around this time...and still enjoy a meal with friends and family, taking some time to think about all in our lives that we are grateful for.
I honestly think that holidays and celebrations throughout the year are vital to our mental and spiritual well-being. We need these happy sparkling moments to make up for the drudgery of everyday life. Holidays are often like rituals, they are time out of time.
They are days that we set outside of our normal life. We put on nice (or extra comfy!) clothes, we gather with people we care about, and we eat good food and seek good times. And that reset is necessary! It gives us something to look forward to, a little goal or reward for doing all the stuff we do every day.
If you do anything long enough, you will end up with good and bad memories. Good results can come from something that has a bad start. But we can always choose which parts to focus on, and how we want to approach something.
And while I don't think it's healthy to always focus on the past, I do think that it is important to have touchstones to our past, and holidays do this in a couple of ways. Firstly, they have roots, the first instance or the reason why we celebrate. And we also have all the memories of every time we have celebrated before. These all become beads on a string that represent the holiday.
Every year, we have the chance to pull out our beads and hold them in our hands. We can remember all the past years and reflect on how we have grown. We can remember people who are no longer with us, and all the good times we had together. We can embrace the nostalgia that comes up, and use it to temper any less pleasant memories that exist.
It's important to not forget, and it's important to not let bad memories rob us of the good ones. Take the time you need to sit with what comes up, but then allow nostalgia to coat you in feelings of warmth and safety. It's okay to enjoy things, even if they have troubled pasts.
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