THIS IS HOLIDAY

Holiday traces its origins to and shares traditions with other winter solstice holidays such as Yule, Saturnalia, Festivus, Şeva Zistanê, Yaldā, Christmas, Pancha Ganapati, Soyal, Hanukkah, Dōngzhì, Kwanzaa, Ziemassvētki, Sanghamitta Day, New Year's Eve, Korochun, Koliada, Afflux, and the Pastafarian holiday celebration also called Holiday.

As in the Pastafarian Holiday tradition, formalities on specifically when and where and how to celebrate are discarded, and strict requirements are rejected in favor of some general guidelines and things to think about during the season. The celebration of Holiday during the winter months not only provides joy during a time when darkness dominates the days, but it gives a chance to reflect on our roles as individuals in relation to our family and society.

The Holiday season starts about one month before the winter solstice and lasts until you're no longer in the mood to celebrate – generally sometime in January. There are six celebration days in Holiday, and they can occur at any time during the season depending on what dates are the most convenient:

HISTORY

The concept of this version of Holiday was created on Saturday, November 19, 2016 after a discussion of whether or not we would be setting up a fake tree indoors and decorating it with shiny and bright things this December. An offhand comment of "What if we just made up our own holiday instead?" was met with surprising enthusiasm, and after watching the Seinfeld episode, "The Strike", which features the parody holiday, Festivus, the three of us started discussing our own family's holiday traditions and what they meant to us.

Much of the initial discussions focused on the irreverence of Festivus, Discordianism, and Pastafarianism and the parallels of the superstitious, the appropriated, and the arbitrary traditions prevalent in modern celebrations. After the whimsy, the conversation turned toward our place in society today -- as Americans, as a privileged family with homes on two continents, and as immigrants in a country where we are not and will probably never be citizens.

We came up with a list of certain things we wanted to keep as traditions and other things we could do without and then started to create our own holiday celebrations that consisted of the things we wanted to keep and the things we wanted to appropriate and try out as new traditions.

HOLIDAY SNOWFLAKE

The Holiday snowflake symbolizes the snow that is prevalent in the winter, the time of year Holiday takes place in the Northern Hemisphere and was chosen as Holiday's primary symbol because of its universality and a lack of religious connotation.

It is constructed by combining six copies of a stylized version of Discordianism's Hand of Eris. The stylized Hand of Eris is composed of seven equal segments -- one central "trunk" and six "branches" that extend from each of the trunk's endpoint at -60°, 0°, & 60° off-axis. It could also be described as two arrows pointing at each other with a seventh segment between and in line with the arrows.

Around the central point, one end of the Hand of Eris points inward and the other end outward, symbolizing both the inward reflection of the individual within the family and the family reaching out to society and our environment, and each of the six iterations of the Hand symbolize a celebration day, with the days that represent opposing concepts placed on opposite sides of the snowflake.

Hand of Eris drawing (above) & Stylized Hand of Eris (below)

This Is Holiday EP

HOLIDAY SONGS

Many of the more popular holidays have songs associated with them, and I decided that Holiday should be no different. In 2017, in an effort to further legitimize Holiday, I created an EP of the first four Holiday songs, This Is Holiday, which was released on November 22, 2017 to coincide with the beginning of the Holiday season.

The EP is available for download via iTunes and is also available through various streaming services.

FABRICA

Fabrica is our day to work and make things for ourselves and for others. For our first Holiday season, we've placed Fabrica after Cymryd on Saturday, December 24, 2016, so we didn't spend the day making gifts to give each other. This year, we focused on making food for ourselves and banana bread to give out for Donar. Lunch included labor-intensive tacos with homemade tortillas and guacamole, with the oven being used in the morning to roast pumpkin to be used in pie and other recipes. After lunch, a pumpkin pie went into the oven to eat the following day, and then the loaves of banana bread went into the oven. For practicality's sake, leftovers (primarily the ones from Cymryd) were eaten for dinner to make room for the pumpkin pie in the refrigerator.

FJERNE

The idea behind Fjerne is to make room for the new by clearing out the old. This first year, we celebrated Fjerne on Saturday, December 17, 2016. We got rid of obvious things like trash, recycling, and glass, but we also dropped off used batteries and light bulbs at a disposal point; took expired prescriptions to the pharmacy to be disposed of properly; gave away some clothes, books, and games; and took some other clothing to a charity drop-off location. Other ideas in the same vein would be to go through the refrigerator and pantry to remove long-expired food, cleaning out the basement/attic, and general organization to move items from where they shouldn't be to where they should be.

CYMRYD

Unlike a day devoted to giving to others, Cymryd is a day that is focused on receiving and indulging. We celebrated our Cymryd this year on Friday, December 23, 2016 with gifts and a feast. This year, we put our gifts under a tree as an homage to Yule and Saturnalia, but a tree is not necessary to celebrate. We also had some relatively large gifts this year (by our standards), but gifts can be as large or as small as needed or wanted. For a feast, most people have a traditional winter feast of turkey, goose, or ham, but we've always had ravioli for our primary feast meal, and this year was no exception. As an added bonus, we ordered a ravioli mold that was due to arrive on the 23rd, and in truly unpredictable La Poste fashion, it was delivered around 8pm the night before, which allowed us to use it to make completely homemade ravioli for our first Cymryd feast, with wonderful results. The ravioli ended up being the only real meal throughout the day, but we were also treated to some crêpes for breakfast and pumpkin cheesecake for dessert in the evening.

DONAR

Donar is the day to give, and the idea here is to give to others less fortunate rather than to family members or close friends. We celebrated our first Donar on Sunday, December 25, 2016. We made 10 care packages of socks, toothbrushes, sausages, chocolates, clementines, tissues, and banana bread, each in a nylon drawstring bag. At 9 AM, we took them out and gave them to the local homeless on the streets. Many of the people who are usually out weren't in their usual spots, so we ventured out a bit further than we had planned, but we ended up giving all 10 of them out in about an hour and a half.

PLEZIER

Plezier is meant to be a day to have fun with friends and family by playing games and celebrating, and our first Plezier was Saturday, December 31, 2016. The morning and early afternoon was spent preparing food, and then that evening, everyone ate, drank, and played games like Fluxx, Picwits, Scattergories, and Spot It. For food, we ate pickle rolls, deviled eggs, seafood chowder, green papaya salad (but made with carrots instead of green papaya), hummus & veggies, soft pretzels, peanut butter balls, and pumpkin crème brûlée. Since it was also New Year's Eve, we counted down to the new year at midnight and made some noise.

FOLIVORA

We celebrated our first Folivora on Sunday, January 1, 2017 by sleeping in late and doing as little as possible. We watched a couple movies on DVD and started to eat the many leftovers that had accumulated throughout the Holiday season.