Holiday

Every year around the holidays, nearly everyone participates in actions that are similar to every previous year of their life. Whether it is propping up a tree or eating one’s mother’s cooking or watching “It’s a Wonderful Life”, there is an element of repetition to the holidays and “holiday” is general. The more important the holiday, the greater the repetition. On Labor Day, one may do something new, but on Christmas, Thanksgiving and Independence Day, it is the same old shit.

Holiday is ritual and it seems to provide function for society. Durkheim claims there are three major functions to ritual:

1) Links the individual to the social whole or to society.
2) Regulates individuals with binding standards of conduct, encouraging some things and discouraging others
3) Renews collective beliefs and sentiments.

Essentially, holiday is a form of conformity whether on a social level or a family level. By doing what everyone else does, one will become part of them and fit in. Now, despite the subject of a number of punk songs, conformity is good for the most part leading to positive things like reading, not murdering and using toilet paper. Of course, most people take conformity too far and become soulless readers of Cosmo and Maxim. If everyone jumps off a cliff and one does it too, one will be part of the idiot collective.

Conformity though is somewhat different from ritual in that conformity can actually be dynamic unlike ritual which appears to be static. The collective participates in new movements, fads and changes that the individual, despite one’s best efforts, must conform to (i.e. e-mail, cell phones, knowing who Paris Hilton is). Ritual, on the other hand, does not change or if it does, it does very slowly.

So, if conformity can offer a connection to society even when it changes, what is the function of ritual being static? Durkheim and I would assume that people that participate in the ritual think that there exist sentiments associated with those rituals and people want those sentiments to be static as well. For instance, with Christmas, people want goodwill and giving to remain in society. By continuing to celebrate Christmas, there is hope these sentiments will continue as well.

Now, I think Durkheim is missing something. Rituals may exist under the guise of “remembering and maintaining the past”, but I theorize that the past never had those sentiments or if they did, they were weaker than today. Christmas is not to remember to the tradition of goodwill and giving, but is an attempt to implant those feeling into people by pretending it existed in the past. Families gather together not to remember and keep their relations, but to create a relationship that never really existed. This is not to imply that families do not have love. They do, but the love does not exist in the form that the holidays try to present it in. Essentially, holiday is not really maintenance of tradition, but an exercise in how one would like the present and future to be.