You gotta create replacement activities man. We can't just phase out all the church attendance and all the usamerican social holidays cold turkey in the middle of a loneliness epidemic bro like yeah fuck church fuck thanksgiving and FUCK the 4th of July but like what's the long-term plan. People need holidays and repetitive social rituals or they go crazy. Like are we inventing new ones or ....?
The entirety of human history is us inventing social groups and rituals over and over again. We need them. I'm not gonna try to give any advice on replacing a keystone community institution like church, but as for holiday rituals?? You gotta have those.
When I was younger, I was extremely bitter and burned out by the holiday rituals I grew up with. They either meant mandatory attendance with biological family I was trying to escape, alcohol-fuelled parties, lots of hollow capitalism, or religion I didn't have or want. But after two years of doing nothing significant to mark time in the year-- no Christmas, no Thanksgiving, no birthday even because I'd moved out and didn't know how to celebrate it as an adult-- I realized how much I missed having something.
A gathering. A celebration. An event. A significance.
So yeah, we're inventing new ones. Pick dates and events that matter to you and do something to mark the day, even if it's only to yourself. Have an annual "it's everybody's birthday" party. Make a full moon dinner every month and invite friends. Decorate your house every solstice and equinox (and clean while you're at it, because rituals also serve practical purposes). Light some candles and play music out loud on the first day of every month. Pick up a leaf when you hear the autumn's first goose and do it every day until they're gone, then burn all your leaves. Hang up a piece of art when the first snow falls and take it down when the first flowers bloom in spring.
Don't cherry pick from religions and cultures that aren't yours. Do be open to celebrating things from other cultures if you're invited. If there are aspects of your old holidays that you like-- dressing up or making food or singing songs-- then by all means keep those things, because guess what, that's all just Shit Humans Always Do. None of these rituals have to be religious or spiritual, but they do have to be significant to you. Fill your life with things you look forward to.
Invent yourself some rituals.
A gathering. A
celebration. An event.
A significance.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
I have a bunch of small scratch paper (quarter sheet of letter size) and I write the occasion at the top in thick marker, the date or however you tell when it is in pen, and then the rest of the sheet is for collecting notes on how we celebrate it, what makes it feel special, when we start planning, what we'd feel sad about if we missed doing it. They are clipped together on the side of the refrigerator, and the current 3-4 are posted on the front.
We have solstices, equinoxes, cross-quarters, birthdays, the national holidays we do celebrate, the ways we avoid some of the others. My family's big midwinter observance is the Solstice, the one for visiting family is Christmas. My partner's tradition is Chinese takeout before midnight mass (mass optional unless Father Bob is in charge). I wear something rainbow every day I go out of the house during Pride. Both national Pride month and state Pride.
(Everyone is welcome to solar and lunar holidays, it's a resident of Earth thing not a specific religion thing, but specific religions do have specific things to do on those occasions. My dad wasn't pagan specifically, he was an astronomy programmer and had fire and feasting in midwinter and fruit and feasting in midsummer. And toured his office building with a spiced hot cider trolley one midwinter, wearing a tropical print sarong and blowing a conch shell. All eight floors from the top down. Because the days are short and the nights are long and if you can't wear your wife's wild turquoise flower print quilting fabric as a sarong in midwinter, when else are you going to do it.)
Each year we make notes if we need to, then put the sheet back in the stack. Things like "use the stand-alone roaster for the turkey" and "2 bags of candy, sort into chocolate, not-chocolate, and peanut, order toys, and put out the teal pumpkin if we have toys"
We're going to add the anniversary of Steph moving up here to the stack pretty soon.
