The Cake with No Name: How the Pandemic Supercharged Time-Shifting Holidays
We Binge TV. Why Not Holidays?
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Finally, at the end of the night, the cake came out. It had multiple layers of ice cream; a crumpled-up, chocolate-cookie crust; and just the right amount of fudge. It also had a single candle. But here’s what felt most distinctive about it.
It had nothing written on top.
Why? There was simply too much say. The cake was for my brother-in-law’s milestone birthday. It was also for the wedding anniversary that my wife, Linda, and I had just marked. It was also for a stray achievement or two from other family members.
It was, in other words, a post-pandemic, pan-party cake.
On the one hand, it would be easy to lament all the milestones and family celebrations that the pandemic wiped out over the last year-and-a-half – the weddings, birthdays, seders, sing-alongs, christenings, retirements, wakes, eids. The only celebrations we didn’t really miss were all the gender reveals; that trend has gotten downright deadly.
But I, for one, welcome this newfangled response: the bundling of bashes. We binge TV. Why not holidays?
My family started time-shifting holidays more than two decades ago. With my parents still living in Georgia and their three children starting families of their own in far-flung cities, flying multiple families across the country twice between Thanksgiving and the end of the year made little sense.
Why not shift Thanksgiving dinner to Friday to reduce the hectic-ness, avoid crowded airports, and give the biscuits more time to rise? Then, as long as we’re all together, why not go ahead and light the Hanukkah candles on Saturday, sing a few off-key melodies, and exchange presents? We called it Thanukkah.
My daughter, Eden, lighting the Hanukkah menorah over Thanksgiving weekend at our 'Thanukkah' celebration.
(As one of my daughters noted in a speech at her religious-school confirmation this spring, “Hanukkah actually fell on Thanksgiving a few years ago, and the whole country started calling it Thanksgivingukkah. We had been doing this for years by that point, but Thanksgivingukkah is just a bad name.”)
You might feel high-minded about this idea, but consider a few facts. Time-shifting holidays is as old as holidays themselves. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday was commemorated on January 18th this year, though his actual birthday was three days earlier; Independence Day was observed on July 5.
Artificial holiday dating goes back even further. Three of the most sacrosanct dates on the American calendar -- July 4th, Thanksgiving and Christmas -- were all time-shifted at one point. The Continental Congress voted for independence from Britain on July 2, 1776, prompting John Adams to write to his wife: “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.”
Oops.
John Adams' original letter about Independence Day to his wife, Abigail.
Christmas has the most volatile dating of all. The Bible gives no date for the birth of Jesus, and in the early centuries of the church, the occasion was celebrated variously in January, March, April, May and November. Not until the third century did Christmas settle on December 25, largely to co-opt the pagan winter solstice celebration.
The pandemic has given us permission to rethink how we celebrate holidays. When the NBC Universal sitcom Superstore aired an episode this spring in which employees, forlorn about missing so many celebrations, held an all-in-one “all-iday party,” viewers took note. “Oh, we’re stealing that, that’s 100%,” said a couple in Massachusetts. Their party mixed Christmas carols with Mother’s Day flowers and a prize wheel listing every celebration they missed.
Characters on NBC's "Superstore" celebrating all the holidays that occurred during COVID-19 with a post-pandemic all-iday party.
This kind of clustering of parties will be especially welcome to two-career, two-religion, two-nation-of-origin, two-remarried-parent families who have so many occasions to mark that they feel like they have to plan, host, and cleanup have from celebrations two weeks.
So instead of moping about missed milestones this year, let’s use the unwelcome opportunity to rethink our over-reliance on the calendar and return to the oldest tradition of them all: Move our celebrations to a time that’s most convenient for us.
And hold more than one when we do so.
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