As a deeply cynical (and hopelessly anti-social) iconoclast, it’s rare that I celebrate… well, anything, really. Don’t get me wrong: I go for wild nights fairly regularly. I will also, however, happily skip birthdays, awards ceremonies (especially one’s where I’m being recognized), and fireworks on Independence Day. As another holiday season rolls around the corner like the big lumbering, wintery oaf that it is, I’m hit with a wave of dread at witnessing the same tired rigmarole of separating celebrants from as much of their yearly earnings as possible over the course of several weeks. Cheery commercials chirping in your ear and smiling in your face like an over-eager date. While not terribly more or less offensive than the usual, it still seems all the more leering and cajoling around winter.
Empires have used tradition to ‘civilize’ people for centuries, supplanting existing cultures with a simulacra under their jurisdiction. New, but familiar practices designed to tug at our heartstrings and make us think of the people we love and the people we’ve lost. We remember our parents as they remembered theirs for no other reason than a chance to feel as close as we once did in days past. It’s a longing that people in power have used to knowingly create psychological and emotional links through artificially mirrored experiences. In the age of Rome, it was the conversion of the pagans to Christianity. Today, it’s movie remakes and ugly sweaters.
Many of us have spent a great deal of the year indoors watching the world in slack-jawed awe as it all goes to pieces. “How did things get so bad?” we ask each other or, otherwise, ourselves. Well, truly it seems the pandemic only served to strip the shiny paint from the calcified turd that’s been propped up as modern societal normalcy in our age. Nothing has changed; certainly not in decades, and perhaps not in centuries. Many of us are just more aware of how hollow it all is because this is a year where a lot of traditions have been pushed aside for practical reasons. Like addicts coming down from a long high, we’re almost instinctually inclined question the legitimacy of these practices as distance from those feelings grows. We see how we stagnate in re-consumption and repetition. It becomes ever more clear how technological and cultural advancement is held back by a lack of resources and support while the rich and powerful push their own, self-serving, agendas onto the backs of the masses and our governments call it progress. Shut up in our rooms, we’re all left to become painfully aware of how horrible it is to exist like we do, day after day with no real, relatable purpose apart from the mechanical accumulation of wealth and, occasionally, distraction from tedium and the crushing knowledge of our shared mortality.
This year, like any other, I will not be celebrating the holidays. Things look bleak, but they’ve always been such. Who needs a reason to be happy? To see people you care about? To put up goofy-looking decorations, give someone a gift, eat and drink too much at party, and watch movies until you fall asleep on the couch? Those experiences don’t have to be reflected through generations or even remembered to be valuable. Eventually, there will be no one left who remembers us, regardless. There’s no point in shouting into the void and trying to live in the echo of one’s own voice. Our lives belong to us alone and I believe in creating new stories. New traditions that have specific, personal meaning. We deserve a culture that is relevant to us.
Sour Revelry 