I love Christmas. Not in the quirky TV-show style "I wear snowman ties and reindeer antlers" way of loving Christmas, rather I just enjoy the Christmas season more than any other time of year. I love the lights everywhere, I love eggnog, I love the smells of Christmas trees, I love all the pomp and circumstance in any retail establishment. The Christmas season also happens to fall in the Late Autumn-Early Winter time of the year, which I find climateologically appealing. The gift giving is irrelevant to me, it's all the ambiance and trappings of the Christmas season that make it my favorite chunk of any year.
It occurred to me today, however, that I've never felt a desire to have Christmas all year round. I've never wished that all of my favorite things about the season would remain in place for the entirety of the year. It seemed strange to me that something I enjoyed so much is not something I would choose to have in perpetuity. And then it hit me: it's maximally enjoyable precisely because it's temporary.
I hope I've not lost my Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Atheist reader, or any other reader that does not want to be immersed in yet another instance of Yuleology. I am, in fact, quite sympathetic that for a quarter of every year, American culture goes into a default Christianity everywhere you look. My essay is not about Christmas per se, and I suspect it applies equally well to Hanukkah, Purim, Eid, Ramadan, Thanksgiving, 4th of July, Earth Day, or any other seasonal observance, religious or otherwise. Every human culture celebrates certain days and participates in certain cyclical rituals, and I've no doubt that my Christmas cheer is no different than someone else's Hanukkah happiness or Ramadan rush or Arbor Day ardor.
One of the unfortunate side-effects about being human is that we can get bored with almost anything. No matter how joyous or special, no matter how pleasurable or enticing, just about anything can become normal, mundane, usual. If you've ever been in a romantic relationship for longer than a couple of months, you know that over time, that person you used to lay awake dreaming about at night and agonize over impressing becomes something else - a person you are comfortable with and with whom you no longer feel that anxiety to wow with your expensive jeans and encyclopedic knowledge of Seinfeld episodes.
This is true of our religious obligations, or for my secular readers, our humanitarian obligations. A sermon or a documentary or a news item can spark in us a furious desire to throw ourselves into more noble endeavors. We're gonna pray more, do more charity work, not drink so much, stop flirting with the Starbucks girl, volunteer more, read our holy books every day, we're gonna really do it all this time! Inevitably, all those things become commonplace and fail to captivate us. "I'm gonna go to church every Sunday!!" becomes "Every Sunday, I go to church." Anything that we care enough about to make a part of our lives becomes an everyday part of our lives, with all the consequences that entails.
This is no secret to anyone, of course, least of all the various cultural organizers throughout history. Everyone from Moses to Christ to Mohammed to Queen Victoria to George Washington to Nietzsche to Gandhi has understood all of this perfectly well. Founders of movements and religions know that daily life is full of rituals that blend together into a muddle of regularity. Cultural ideas can get lost if their habits run together with brushing teeth, packing lunches, shaving, and having a glass of wine before bed. This is why every culture in the world has something akin to a holy day, holiday, day of remembrance, or day of awareness. Cultures are built on the foundations of these days. The daily life of an American farmer in the 1600's living off the land was probably not too terribly different from that of a French farmer, African farmer, Chinese farmer, or anyone else who grew their own food to survive. What made them all different was the culture they bore, transmitted largely during these holidays.
The content of what I'm writing, the idea I'm toying with, is all expressed in the words you're reading on this page. And yet, imagine if I stripped out every period, comma, and paragraph spacing. Imagine how tedious and frustrating it would be to read without punctuation. Our holidays, whichever we choose, are the punctuation in our years. They are the pauses, the breaths, the dividers and emphasizers in our lives. Humans will probably never evolve past having a "usual, everyday life". This is why our holiday seasons are so important. They make us stop for minute, take a breath, and remember what is important to us. They break up the monotony of daily living and that jolt comes with a cultural message attached. Whether we are remembering the way God cared for his people in captivity, whether we are ruminating on the birth of a savior, whether we are purifying ourselves and submitting our appetites to God, whether we are remembering those who died for our country, whether we are reaffirming our love for our spouse, or whether we are modifying our habits for the health of the planet, our holidays are the way we protect those things from fading into a domestic malaise. And in the same way an essay cannot be composed entirely of punctuation, our lives must all go back to normal at some point, lest the transcendent become normal and thus unremarkable.
From all of us here at Tactical Therapy (which is just me), have a wonderful punctuation, whatever it is.
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