“Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.” This is the site prompt today. I’m not going to, but I do think there is a certain charm to the exercise. Anything that encourages us to dig into our bottomless (and largely ignored) well of creativity is wholly positive, as far as I’m concerned.
I have 2 great friends who have designed programs – one is a course of study, the other is an audio/video companion to an already existing plan. The ‘how’ they each did this is quite different, and that feels like the point. We are very different, we weren’t designed to be little carbon copies walking around trying to fit into the same holes in the same box. Those holes are mostly single-use and, sometimes, some of us eschew the box altogether.
The Angel is neck deep in planning a community celebration. The school building where she works is 100 years old, so she is compiling yearbooks, pictures, artifacts, and anything having to do with the last century. This is especially significant because this history is coming to a close (or should be), this building has outlived its usefulness. The kind of building a school required in 1926 is far removed from the necessities of 2026.
One of her favorite discoveries is a high senior class picture from the 1940’s. The boys are in suits, the girls are in what looks sort of like wedding dresses.
I often write about the modern annihilation of time and place. The notion that anything is sacred or set apart from anything else is hopelessly outdated. We wear t-shirts and sneakers to weddings and funerals. There was an expression when I was younger, “church clothes,” that described a formal outfit. How do I have to dress for this? Church clothes. I didn’t go to church, but everyone knew what it meant. We wore our “Sunday best” to distinguish special events from the everyday.
I certainly am not advocating dresses and suits (or maybe I am), I don’t even think we need to look particularly fancy for church (or maybe I do), but I do think we’ve lost the mindset that anything is special. In a culture of casual disposability, the very idea of sacred has been lost. We eat meals in the car, send texts at 2am, hook up without strings. We take absolutely everything for granted, treat miracles as if they were simply common occurrences.
Maybe my holiday would be Today, and in this holiday, we would eat diner together without our cell phones, we’d listen and laugh, notice & treat each as the extraordinary creatures we are. Today, we’d use the fine china and eat slowly, savoring the tastes, the textures. I don’t care what the dress code for this holiday would be, but our hearts would be soft and prepared, and that usually means we would also look prepared, as if we’ve been anticipating Today and want to remember it. We would take each breathe with gratitude. Today, we would love each other.
And then, the best thing about this New Holiday, is that we could do it again tomorrow, when tomorrow is Today.
