Revel and Ritual in the Post-Prosperity Age (UPDATE)

Revel and Ritual in the Post-Prosperity Age (UPDATE): "

In America, one of the lingering legacies of our Puritan roots is a simultaneous mistrust and economic exploitation of holidays and festivals. It really wasn't until the late 19th Century that holidays like Christmas and Halloween became popular- or even tolerated in some quarters. But there's still a strange sense of impropriety about it all, as if we should feel guilty about the act of celebration.

In addition, our holidays have become a minefield of commercial exploitation, which -surprise, surprise - only feeds into our alienation. Christmas has all but been destroyed by commercialism and sectarianism. It needs a major makeover and will probably get one if the economy continues to tank. Given the current political climate, it would probably need to be some kind of generic Winter Solstice festival, but that's where most of the familiar Christmas trappings- the cool ones, at least- originally come from anyhow.

At their roots all of our holidays are keyed into the rhythms of nature, which we have almost completely divorced ourselves from in our denatured existence. But there are signs of change. A lot of this is bleedover from the gay community, a lot of is coming from the neopagan and goth communities. You also have the equivalent of holidays-slash-pilgrimages with the convention circuit in different fan communities as well.

When you think about how we go through the workaday week, you realize it's these kind of holidays that give structure to our day to day life. It may be counterintuitive, but I don't see why Christmas and Easter (read: Ishtar) can't be celebrated by everybody, since they are in fact impossibly ancient holidays that were Christianized solely for political reasons.

I'm very encouraged by the Halloween revival and all of the Burning Man offshoots out there. The Super Bowl, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, St. Paddy's, Easter, Cinco De Mayo, Summer Solstice, Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's Eve- hell, bring it on. Get together and dress up and celebrate and drink and screw and eat and laugh and puke. It may end up being the closest thing to a social glue we have.

Meanwhile, I'll just sit in my space capsule here and try to parse the meaning of it all. And one meaning I've parsed is that not only are these festivals increasingly independent of belief systems, they may actually be better off without them. The meaning is the act of the celebration itself. But again, at their core these festivals are based in those rhythms of nature that religious narratives were later imposed on.

The corporatization of our culture breeds alienation and isolation, and the result of that is paranoia. The cure for that debilitating disease is community, gathering, interaction, networking. And this new model of holiday gives these processes a compelling structure. The gay community has traditionally used festival and celebration as a way to deal with alienation and isolation, as have marginalized immigrant communities.

Now that we are all made to feel alien and expendable, it's only natural for this process to spread into the mainstream.

In their purest form, holidays give us an opportunity to reconnect with symbol and with ritual, which can't help but feed the Dreaming Mind. But only if these rituals are taken back from the pimps and ripoff artists who've been controlling them for the past hundred years.

UPDATE: This is interesting. Cheers to Astronut.

UPDATE: Please tell me this is a joke:

Earlier this week the Catholic Church in Spain also condemned the growing popularity of Halloween, saying it threatened to overshadow the Christian festival of All Saints' Day.

The Bishop of Siguenza-Guadalajara, Jose Sanchez, said there was a risk that Halloween could 'replace Christian customs like devotion to saints and praying for the dead.'

Uh, excuse me, your holiness but don't you have it the wrong way round?

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