Oct 30

The Holidays - Insanity or Sanity? Choose Now.

With the feast of Halloween upon us, we have begun the year-end holiday season. Did you know our Halloween rituals date back to the Celts in the British Isles and Northern France, and to the Romans?

A Season of Rituals
The end of the year is an important time. In the days when most people lived on the land in a more intimate way, the Halloween ritual symbolized crossing a threshold - leaving the season of light and abundance and entering a time of rest, dark and cold. Feasts were more than entertainment; they included sacrifices to the earth, as a gratitude offering for its abundance. Some spiritual traditions still contain offerings of ordinary food to spirit and to earth.

In the northern hemisphere, the winter nights were cold and long. Food stocks accumulated during the harvest season must be made to last the entire season of hard, recuperating ground. Faith was important; would the food last? Would illness slither in on its ice cold belly?

Our modern holiday season contains some of the same rituals. We feast ahead of the long winter. Those of us in the middle and upper economic classes don’t really fear life-threatening illness or starvation. Nonetheless, the feast ahead of the dark and cold signifies we have some understanding that the energy of summer and the earth-tone radiance of autumn have subsided.

Unnatural Movement
That may be where the comparisons end. We keep pushing through the winter as if it were summer. We go overboard with the festivities in our holiday season until we are exhausted. We pack our schedules so full that we lose touch with the slowing pace of the food-providing earth. We manipulate the clocks to “make the days last longer.” Of course, it doesn’t change time. In all, we slow down very little.

Every year I hear people tell me what they have planned for the holiday season. The stories are the same - year in and year out. The standard tales are told with a mix of foreboding and pride that they can endure the exhaustion. “Look at me. I’m strong because my season will be exhausting and I’ll still survive it.” The stories are always the same.

This year I have less tolerance for them. I no longer have high tolerance for repetitious tales of fatigue woven into lists of upcoming events told with puffed-out chests and slumped shoulders.

Right Thinking
We are not victims to exhaustion; we are seducers of it! It is a fallacy to think that a full life includes no silence, no stillness. It is a fallacy to believe that sitting quietly and moving slowly with the colder air means we’re not powerful. It is wrong thinking to drive the body hard against natural rhythms as if it is ignorant of its needs - and yours. Refusing to listen does not make us right.

A good and full season should include slowness, silence and peacefulness. And, it’s up to you to pull those into your days. This culture, this all-activity-all-the-time culture, will not make it easy for you. It is the river to the salmon. You must be strong and determined to make it to the top. On balance, you must make a super-conscious choice: will your seasonal rituals lift you up, or break you down?

What will it be? Holiday insanity or sanity? Choose now.

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