Holidays and Traditions
We are largely unsatisfied with holidays as they exist now. Many modern holidays are more about commercial sales events than cultural values and many have been unmoored from their fitness-imparting cultural, philosophical, and religious underpinnings. As such, there is a case to be made for reconstructing a collection of holidays for whatever culture you choose to reinforce or develop.
In addition to instilling values in the next generation, family rituals play a critical role in healthy psychological development. In 2002, Eaker and Walters[[83]](#_ftn83) found not only that family ritual satisfaction was positively correlated with adolescent psychosocial development, but also that it mediated the relation between family boundaries and psychosocial development, and decreased levels of discontentedness. These types of findings have been replicated. For example, Yesel Yoon[[84]](#_ftn84) found in 2012 research that family ritual satisfaction correlates with greater psychological wellbeing in general.
As an added benefit, self-denial rituals found across cultures (Ramadan, Lent, the Fast of the Firstborn, etc.) help strengthen an individual’s inhibitory pathways in their prefrontal cortex, making it easier for them to shut down intrusive thoughts and snowballing emotional states.
A common hazard people encounter when creating new traditions involves an overreliance on the aesthetics of religious ceremonies, making them very “woo-woo.” Overdoing religious ceremonial hullabaloo produces torture sessions in which people are encouraged to hold hands, sing songs, and discuss intimate personal issues with strangers—far too cringe and cult-like to encourage widespread adoption.
Instead of focusing on the aesthetics of your evoked set of religious holidays, focus on designing a holiday to convey a specific culturally relevant message or lesson. Try to create a tradition that people would find aspirational and engaging: The type of thing someone would publicly flaunt online (i.e., make it Instagrammable).
We see one category of these as the “Instagram holidays.” This utilizes a date as an excuse to post something on social media or make a timely comment among friends, coworkers, and family. Two prominent examples of this can be seen in the form of Pi Day (March 14—3.14) and Star Wars Day (May the Fourth … as in “be with you”). While these holidays have been good at spreading (which is certainly more than we can say for most lame secular holidays, like the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s “Avoid Artichokes Day” and “Pirate Garb Day”) they have not blossomed into anything more than fads because they miss the four key ingredients of successful holiday design:
- Child-centricity
- Spectacle
- Gift-giving or exchanges
- Convening otherwise-dispersed people
Child-centricity
Children (and through children, parents) are the primary “customers” of holidays. A child’s wonder is what gives a holiday magic. Holidays mostly for adults, like Valentine’s Day in the U.S., have an off-key soullessness to them when contrasted against more child-centric holidays like Halloween, Christmas, and Easter. As such, a great holiday is very likely to feature a certain level of roleplay, imagination, and suspension of disbelief given these are means through which children interact with the world.
Spectacle
The importance of spectacle in holidays is exemplified by the most successful holiday/celebration day invented during our lifetimes: The gender reveal party. Invented by Jenna Karvunidis in 2008, gender reveal parties—in which expecting parents leverage some form of creative spectacle to reveal the sex of their soon-to-arrive new baby—have become so popular that already (in just 14 years) at least seven people have died as a result of their activities. Another great example of a holiday that has leveraged spectacle to spark engagement can be seen in the 4th of July, which, in terms of public consciousness, dramatically outcompetes similar secular holidays like Labor Day and Presidents’ Day.
Given that both Independence Day and gender reveal parties appear to be correlated with increased mortality risk and that other spectacle-heavy holidays, like Guy Fawkes Day, often involve fire and danger—we beseech readers to carefully consider and select idiot-proof spectacles that won’t cause death, injury, or major wildfires.
Gift-giving or exchanges
Holidays that seem to resonate with the public consciousness also commonly leverage gift giving or some form of exchange (such as candy in exchange for showing up in a costume on Halloween). The importance of gift-giving can be seen in the relatively higher popularity of Valentine’s Day in Japan (vis-a-vis Valentine’s Day in the U.S.), which features the ritualized gifting of handmade chocolates by women to the men in their lives (and is followed by White Day one month later, in which these gifts are reciprocated).
Convening otherwise-dispersed people
A great holiday will convene groups of people who would otherwise not see each other. This alone can carry an entire holiday, as we see with Thanksgiving in the United States, which really has very little else going for it. What is important to remember with this point is that this group need not be family. We can see this in the omnipresent 4th of July parade group, block party, or BBQ.
Beyond these powerful elements, successful holiday also often incorporate some element of:
- Storytelling
- Specific foods or ingredients
- Thematic decorating schemes (anything that creates a good photo opportunity)
- FOMO-inducing photo opportunities (any opportunity to post a photo in which you are clearly celebrating a distinct special event that leaves others regretting their lack of involvement)
- Competitions (though these have largely been removed from our declawed society)
- Easy-to-enter, hard-to-master elements (holidays should require minimal effort to engage with but also bestow serious social credibility to those who go all-out, spending weeks to prepare or set up decorations)
One technique that can be used when designing a holiday or tradition is to modify an already practiced public holiday by adding private traditions that imbue it with meaning. Christianity was great at doing this with its early holidays, twisting pre-existing public ceremonies to highlight a specific Christian cultural message. Unfortunately, the memetically replicable aspects of those Christian holidays have mostly overwhelmed these holidays’ more substantive religious messages.
Suppose you wanted to create a holiday designed to help kids better empathize with perspectives vastly different from their own by “walking in someone else’s shoes” for a day. This holiday will feel far more natural if built into Halloween, which would allow a child to practice the “substantive” ritual at home (e.g., through discussions over dinners about what it must be like to be a vampire, what vampires have to worry about, the ethics of deciding where and how to source blood for sustenance, etc.) while still carrying over the costume and character into a public setting without seeming weird (e.g. by trick-or-treating as a vampire with friends).
When designing holidays, also keep in mind that there are three major types of cultural celebrations:
- Annual holidays: Holidays like Diwali, Easter, and Halloween that happen once every year
- Milestone holidays: Celebrations like birthdays, bar/bat mitzvahs, quinceañeras, weddings, or baby showers
- Routine holidays: Celebrations like the Jewish Sabbath or Mormon Family Home Evenings
To ignore milestones is to miss a chance to frame important life developments in the context of cultural values and imperatives. To overlook routine holidays is to miss a huge opportunity to make the practice of cultural values routine.
Below we will describe three altered or new holidays that you are free to either take and use within your own family or see as inspiration for holiday innovations of your own. We will go over our full calendar of holidays in detail in a future book.