Celebrating the Season Numenously

[talon]

As far as I know, all the Numenists are American, even if they may temporarily be in another country. This means many of our Numenous traditions are American-based and oriented. Of course, this being America, that means that we have the traditions and contacts to pull from almost any culture's traditions on Earth because the chances are very high that our adherents can directly trace their ancestry to that country or culture.

This is never more apparent than during the winter holiday season (which, depending upon your point of view, can stretch from Fall Equinox to Spring Equinox). We celebrate Oktoberfest, Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, Thanksgiving, Cookie Day, Yule, Christmas, Saturnalia, Juvenalia, New Years', Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, St. Nick's Day, Epiphany, St. Lucia's Day, Lupercalia, Valentine's Day, Mardi Gras, Easter, and a few others I can't remember right off hand. We celebrate them because Numenism was designed to be a celebratory religion and because we have ancestors that celebrate these holy days, and so we embraced them in our own way.

Yes, we've kind of changed them and made these holidays our own. One of the first things we did was disengage gift-giving as an essential celebratory activity. We give gifts, but we don't feel obligated to do so and we don't do so based on a holiday. I buy gifts whenever I find something I think someone else would want or needs, preferably on sale, and then I give it to them the next time I see them. I make gifts all year long, not in some frenzy leading up to a specific holiday, and give them when I'm finished with them. Most Numenists do the same thing, except the ones who have large-ish families that still buy into Giftmas. There are also a few Numenists who see certain family members only during a winter holiday (usually Thanksgiving or Christmas) and so do their gift-giving at those times. What we did instead was remove the gifting pressure from the holiday to return it to being an act of pleasure and joy that isn't tied to a holiday at all. You might get a gift in May or August instead of December if that's when we are most likely to see you - or we happen to have the gift or we see you or whatever.

That frees our holidays up to be holidays - times where we get together to party. Decorations and food are important to us, and mingling with family and friends. And we've kind of blurred some traditions into other holidays. For example, decorated trees. We have kidnapped the decorated tree and use it for other holidays - not all of them, just the ones that come with small decorative items, like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Dia de los Muertos, Cookie Day, St. Nick's Day to Epiphany, Mardi Gras, Valentine's Day, Easter, July 4th.

Each holiday has its own food and feasting traditions. For example, on the solstices, the first person to see the rising sun gets to pick what we eat for breakfast. Cookie Day, obviously, is a day of eating cookies. On Yule, the first person to find the hidden pickle in the tree gets to choose the day's main activity. On the Equinoxes, we eat opposites (sweet and spicy, hard and soft, dark and pale, heavy and light...) to maintain the balance. On All Hallows Day, we eat a stew made from every meat and vegetable we ate the previous year and a pie of every fruit and a bread of every grain.

Each holiday comes with music and special activities, and we listen to that music or do those activities.

We spend time at each holiday pondering why it's a holiday, which includes overarching history as well as personal history, and what it means to us now, and what we want it to mean to us. This kind of reflection is particularly important for people who have suffered a personal injury near the holiday so they can change the meaning and feeling of the holiday to better reflect its divine origin. For those of us who suffer a loss or personal tragedy near or on a holiday, this gives us time to accept it and move forward, to consciously make a change to celebrate the holiday in a way that makes us happy.

And since this post is about how we celebrate Christmas in specific, what we mostly do is party - we attend the parties others invite us to and we invite them to a party we have, we eat lots of yummy food, listen to music that makes us happy, do good deeds, and eat yummy food, and chat up our friends and co-workers and neighbors, and put up decorations that make us feel happy and good, and eat yummy food, and visit friends, and send long rambling emails or letter to distant friends and family, and eat yummy foods. At Halloween and Dia de los Muertos and Thanksgiving, we paid tribute to our loved ones who died so we don't have to gloom and be glum that they are not physically present with us anymore at this time. Now is a time to mingle with friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, and even strangers to party and eat yummy food. We don't celebrate on any specific day, we simply celebrate all through the season as opportunities arise.

We don't celebrate Giftmas. Ever. We don't stress out about buying gifts for friends or family members or others, so we don't have to have generic wrapped presents to hand out to people we don't know. We give presents when we feel the urge to do so - sometimes that means giving presents at Christmas because that's when we're most likely to see the person we're gifting, but we don't feel the need to buy lots of presents and certainly not lots of expensive presents.

This is why you'll never see me post a wish list around this time of year and why, after Giftmas is over, you won't see me posting about the loot I acquired and how disappointed I am that no one gave me whatever was my current heart's desire. Sometimes, if I remember, I may do a wish list around my birthday, which is really the only holiday for which we routinely give gifts. I just looked through my archives and it looks as if I've never remembered. Ah well. There's always next year. I think "Giftmas" is the reason so many people stress over the season- they are worried about giving the exact right gift, worried about affording all those gifts, and upset that they didn't get what they hoped for. It's a horrible holiday and one we refuse, as Numenists, to celebrate.

Other cultures and religions also have mid-winter celebrations, and like us, they celebrate in their own ways. No one owns a date on the calendar, so we are all free to celebrate whatever holy day or holiday we wish this time of year. This is how we celebrate our holiday season.