X-Holidays

A lot of people get upset with replacement words for Christmas. I think that’s interesting. I understand that there was a movement a few years back to secularize the Christmas season and so there is an understandable opposition to this movement, which takes place largely in marketing and advertising. In any case, I find it ironic that the replacement words are actually Christian words as well. Take X-mas for example. I remember a children’s book about a place where they celebrated “X-mas” by selling manger scenes with Xes in mangers and watching tv shows about Xes. I used to think that “X-mas” was just an extreme way of avoiding using the name“Christ.” It turns out “X” isn’t actually an “x.” I mean it isn’t an English “x.” It’s actually a Greek letter pronounced “chi” which happens to be the first letter in the Greek spelling of Christ. In fact in a lot of C. S. Lewis’s letters he uses the abbreviation X in words like Xian (Christian). Not that it’s okay just because C. S. Lewis did it. My point is just that this supposedly secularized abbreviation actually stems from Christian tradition.

People also don’t like the word Holiday. I understand that it is can be less satisfying to see your favorite department store proclaiming “Happy Holidays” than “Merry Christmas” but think about this for a minute. Even when unbelievers say“Merry Christmas” they are usually celebrating Santa Claus and warm fuzzy feelings of goodwill which are inspired by colorful blinking lights rather than the good news signaled by the arrival of Immanuel. Do we really want to force people to celebrate pine trees, shopping and happy music?

That aside, I still don’t mind the phrase “Happy Holidays” because it still points back to Christian tradition. The closest thing to a homonym (there is probably a better word, for “sounds like…” but I don’t know it) for holidays is holy days. I’m fairly certain (I’m not connected to the internet to verify this) that this is because of the Gregorian calendar in which the days of the year were tied to the activities of the church. Monasteries had particular daily schedules as well. There were specific Psalms that would be read on a certain day at a certain time. The times of the day and the seasons of the year were tied to particular prayers, songs and readings to mark the day.

In my last post I talked about the way that music connects us to memories. The changing of seasons help to connect us to memories. Imagine living in a city with no seasons. Don't say Phoenix. We don't have snow, but we still have seasons. Seasons keep us from living purely linear lives. Even while we move forward, we remain in cycles. Think about if temperature was linear. Either it would never change, it would always be getting hotter or it would always be getting colder. Why is it that time is the only thing that never goes backwards? As time is always increasing, everything else loops around and rises and falls.

The calendar keeps us connected to other points in time. Think about life as a graph with a standard x-y axis with time as the x-axis and some thing else in the y-axis like the date. The date is always changing, but your y coordinate will sometimes be the same. So in one dimension, you go back and forth, in another dimension you are never in the same place twice. Now think of life as thousands of different factors, each one a dimension (of course it's impossible to picture, but you can understand the idea) thousands of dimensions are always changing, back and forth, up and down: weight, location, date, friends, emotions. Holy days are an interesting time in that sense because so many dimensions line up. We have traditions, which means that we like to go to the same places, eat the same food, sing the same songs, we spend time with the same people, decorate our house the same way, read the same books and think the same thoughts that we have every year in the past. In some ways we are living in the past. We replicate it genuinely. But time keeps moving on. Some things will never be replicated and the things that are different make us realize where we stand, to realize what has changed over the year and make us aware of the changes that are coming. Memories can also hurt us more deeply because the differences are sharper and more abrasive. Memories give us tantalizing pieces of the past, a melancholy sense of what has changed and never will be again. They also show us the things that have remained the same, and the things that never change. Those are the things that the Church reminds us of every year.

Remember the holy days.