Christmas is over. Take a moment to grieve the end of the holidays — or celebrate a short reprieve from your annual gig as Santa Claus.
But the holidays aren’t over. The truth is, holidays never have to end. I learned at a young age that there’s always some odd holiday to celebrate.
When I was in elementary school and my older sister was in middle school, I would try to follow along every evening as my sister grabbed a brown paper lunch bag from the cupboard, consulted her list of holidays for the month, and drew some representation of the holiday for the following day on the bag with colored markers. Dogs and cats for National Pet Day, candy bars for National Chocolate Day, frilly hearts for Valentine’s Day, a large rainbow for National Find A Rainbow Day. The next morning, she would pack her lunch in the bag and head to school. She proudly carried a holiday every day on her lunch sack.
What surprised me as a child was that there was a holiday for each day — in fact, there were often multiple holidays each day that she would choose from when completing her drawings.
Now we come across these more obscure holidays on social media. Instagram and facebook posts on National Sibling Day, National Boyfriend Day, National Dog Day. My feed is often overcrowded with cookie recipes on National Chocolate Chip Cookie Day.
You may think that these holidays don’t count because you don’t get work off — imagine how I could spend my time on National Bagel Day if I had the day off — and maybe they don’t contain the same depth and excitement as Christmas or Thanksgiving. But at their core, holidays are what we make of them.
Holidays are built from the rituals we perform. Christmas is not a day. It is a season because Christmas is really the accumulation of acts we perform, each year, every year. For me, Christmas is decorating sugar cookies, wrapping (and then unwrapping) presents, hanging our family ornaments on the Christmas tree, smelling cinnamon and pine needles in our home and singing the same songs I’ve been singing since childhood because nobody wants new Christmas songs. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without our family traditions.
If you want to make the holidays last all year long, you have to create your own celebrations to fill in the gaps between the “big” holidays. And it all comes down to tradition and ritual. Something to look forward to and repeat each year. If you fancy pies like I do, you can make Pi Day on March 14 a “real” holiday in your family by starting and maintaining a yearly ritual around it.
To build a holiday, there are a few key elements that can make it more memorable.
According to the Scientific American, olfactory stimuli — or scents — produce more brain activity than visual stimuli and often bring up vivid memories or emotions when we smell a scent from our past. The Scientific American explains that smells are processed in the olfactory bulb at the base of our brains which has a direct connection to our amygdala, which processes emotion, and our hippocampus, which is involved in memory and learning. So our connection between scent and memory is “due to the architectural layout of our brain.”
Another key component of a holiday, tied to smell, is food. Often seasonal foods and spices such as pumpkin or peppermint for colder months and watermelon or berries for warmer months, add to the excitement of an event. Foods made with seasonal ingredients fulfill the holiday function of marking time while also enhancing the “special occasion” ambience.
The final components to a strong, time-resilient holiday are people and activities. Every “big” holiday should bring to mind the people you spend it with, whether friends or family. And every “big” holiday, whether it’s painting Easter eggs, setting off fireworks, making craft turkeys or wrapping presents to put under a pine tree, has unique associated activities.
If you’re feeling down about the holiday season coming to an end, you have the power of holiday creation at your fingertips. Gather friends and family, find a reason to celebrate and make it last with holiday-building rituals.