As the year comes to an end, the days have grown noticeably shorter. With the sun retreating earlier and earlier, the time we have left feels increasingly limited. The frantic rush to buy gifts and coordinate calendars with family and friends creates the sense that there is not a moment to waste. This is the holiday experience for many. It is ironic, considering that a century ago, this time of year was seen as a quiet, contemplative period. It raises the question: why? What do the holidays actually mean to us as a culture? And how has our relationship with them changed over time?
To answer these questions, I turned to the insights of Dr. Elizabeth Coody and Dr. Bruce Forbes, who suggest that our modern holiday stress is the result of a collision between two very different calendars: the biological rhythms of our planet and the relentless march of our commercial economy.
To Bake A Holiday
To understand our current relationship with the holidays, we have to look at how history has stacked traditions on top of one another. Forbes describes this accumulation as a “three-layer cake.” The bottom layer, the most ancient and essential, is seasonality.
“That base layer is that they’re seasonal celebrations, which you can see would be common in virtually every culture,” Forbes explains. Before they were about gifts or specific religious beliefs, holidays were a human reaction to the environment.
Elizabeth Coody expands on this, noting how historically, this time of year was defined by a “period of waning.” It is a season where “a seed goes in the earth, it’s dark and quiet, and then the seed comes forth after the earth has warmed up.” In the ancient world, this time of year was a significant threat to life. The days were short, the cold was dangerous, and our survival wasn’t guaranteed.
In this context, the holiday season was about survival via our human bonds. Coody points out that “winter’s a dark time of the year; we need to band together as human beings.” The festivals of light that populate December were practical psychological tools designed to “remind people of the light that will come back… or the light that is still here within us.” Forbes affirms this sentiment as well, expressing that “when the dark descends upon us, this time of year gives us something we’re able to hold onto until the light returns.”
This leads to the second layer of Forbes’ cake: the addition of religious or national meaning, which facilitates what he calls recommitment.
Coody argues that this remains the core function of the holidays: “It’s about renewing your relationships with other people…the idea that you need a time to sort of punctuate and remind each other that you’re important.” In the harsh dead of winter, reminding our community of our mutual dependence wasn’t just sentimentality; it was how we survived the season.
What’s Happened to The Holidays?
If the holidays have been about quiet renewal and deepening relationships for so long, why do they cause us to feel so frantic and constrained today?
The answer lies in Forbes’ third layer: “Modern popular culture.” Forbes notes that a society needs to vent and let go, which is a function he calls “Release,” but the current architecture of our culture has warped that need.
This is where the harm comes in. As Forbes puts it: “Because we have all these inhibitions and all the rest, sooner or later, for a society to be healthy, it needs to vent and let go.”
Coody identifies a critical divergence that has occurred: “They [corporations] have slowly divorced Christmas from its seasonality and they’ve tried to marry it to their commercial interest.”
The earth is telling us to be quiet and wait, but the economy is telling us to run. “Commercially, contemplation makes no sense,” Coody says, “The preparation needs to be loud and it needs to be busy.” To maximize sales, corporations have to “back that calendar up quite a bit,” pushing the noise of the holiday earlier and earlier, invading the time that used to be reserved for harvest and rest.
We are living in a state of permanent friction against our own nature. “We need seasons and holidays and time apart… because that is how we are structured as human beings,” Coody asserts. “Humans are not built for this… to just constantly be ‘on’ all the time.”
Furthermore, we have fallen victim to the “hedonic treadmill.” We are told that buying things will heal the emptiness or the stress of the year. But as Coody notes, “It’s desire that’s the problem.” We run and run to attain the perfect holiday experience, only to find the satisfaction fleeting, and we are left exhausted on the “treadmill,” looking for the next dopamine hit.
The Art of Waiting
So, is there anything we can do? Is there a way to take back the holidays from the machine that wants to sell them to us?
The solution, according to Coody, is to view the holidays as “an act of resistance.”
Resistance looks like embracing the “preparation” rather than the “event.” Coody speaks fondly of the Christian concept of Advent, a four-week period before Christmas centered around stillness. “It is contemplative, it’s quiet… a time of purification and preparation.”
In a culture of instant gratification, the act of waiting is counter-cultural. It forces us to acknowledge that we can’t have everything all the time. It reintroduces scarcity into our lives, which in turn makes eventual joys more meaningful. “If we can pay attention to each other… if we can hold time for one another,” Coody suggests, we can break the cycle.
We can also reclaim the season by acknowledging the darkness rather than trying to drown it out with artificial noise. Realizing that this is a “period of waning” allows us to forgive ourselves for not being productive. It grants us permission to rest. Bruce Forbes says this is important “because there are rhythms in life, and if we lose our connection to them we’re in trouble… I think it has an impact on mental health.”
Coody mirrors Forbes’ sentiment, concluding, “The more we can find a way to get in touch with the rhythms of the world, the better off we are.”
Conclusion
“The holidays” were never meant to be a burden. They are the manifestation of humanity’s ability to find the light, even in the coldest and darkest reaches of the night, through recommitment to our neighbors and the release of life’s tensions.
If we feel harmed by the current relationship with the holidays, it is because we have allowed the top layer of commercial noise to crush the foundation. We have traded the deep, quiet work of renewal for the frantic work of consumption.
Reclaiming this space requires the conscious choice to step off the treadmill. It requires us to say, as Coody suggests, “Nope, it’s Christmas. I’m not working.” It requires us to build our own light, steadily, by tending to the relationships that keep us warm.
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