Simple Holidays: Will This Work for What I Celebrate?

Posted on September 30, 2009 by LJ Earnest
Categories: Holidays

Photo by topher76 Editor’s note: since this blog is not about religion or religious paths, I will delete any disparaging comments about any faith or practice.

I am going to give you my personal background and a sketch of my journey through this so that it can be understood that this applies to ANY of the mid-winter holidays. If it will work for me, with a really crazy mishmash of holidays, it will work for anyone.

The Dreaded Holidays

I used to dread the holidays. I used to do holidays as my family had, the full-on American version of the Christian holiday of Christmas. Every year as and adult that I followed this pattern, I hated it worse. I was following someone else’s script for a holiday that wasn’t even my own. I would have preferred to ignore the entire season, along with all the activities that go along with it.

When my daughter was born, I felt I had to do something to reconcile this situation. Tradition is fairly important to me, and I didn’t want to make my daughter be left out of all the celebrations in the winter. After a couple years of intense soul-searching, my husband and I crafted a set of meaningful traditions. And from there holiday simplification was born.

But I’m {fill in the blank}…

Just about every religion and culture celebrates something at mid-winter: Bodhi Day (Buddhist), Yule (Celtic, Pagan), Christmas (Christian), Diwali (Hindu), Hanukkah (Jewish), Eid ul-Adha (Muslim, which I understand falls mid-winter at this time). If you don’t believe in any of those, there is a host of secular festivals as well, including Kwanzaa, Solstice and the New Year. And if those choices aren’t enough, there are lots of fictional festivals as well (Festivus).

Each holiday is going to involve similar things since we are all humans. Most holidays contain elements of food, socialization, charity or giving, decorations and activities. And you can blend them, too…

My Personal Story

I was raised Roman Catholic and celebrated the traditional American Christmas, along with my religious holiday and my father’s family’s traditions (he is the son of German immigrants). I joined the Unitarian-Universalist church after college and celebrated a more-secular-than-Christian Christmas and a simplified Hanukkah. Finding my spiritual path in the natural world, my holidays began to include the Solstice. When I married, my husband, who was raised Presbyterian, added his own version of UU practice to the mix: Buddhism.

You can see what I was up against, trying to merge everything important to us while leaving out the items that did not hold meaning; and working with the culture so that my daughter would be included and have good memories.

But Will It Work For Me?

Yes.

Planning for the holidays, even mixing together things from all sorts of traditions and backgrounds, can be done. If a certain part of the planning does not apply to what you do, skip it. If there are expanded plans to be done, you have time to do them.

So What Now?

Now that we’ve cleared up that this will work for you, let’s get started…the next post in this series will give you suggestions for the materials you will need to get started.

The Structure of the Series

For each week in October, probably on the weekends, I will post an article with the tasks for the week. At the end of the series, you can expect to see an ebook available to summarize everything, just in time for most people’s holiday planning.

Photo by topher76