Holy-day boldly

Our national statutory holidays are pathetically outdated. Consider this quick survey of our glorious days off:

• New Year’s Day: marking the launch of another year of our Lord (Anno Domini).

• Good Friday and Easter Monday: Jesus died so we could get the day off? (Many people believe this Friday is good simply because it is a holiday). Children and a few others get Easter Monday off to recover from chocolate hangovers. (Easter Monday is actually a remnant of Roman Catholic influence on Canadian culture).

• Victoria Day: our Victorian (a word now defined as “prudish, moralistic and religiously oppressive”) past is ritualized with trips to garden centres and fireworks.

• Canada Day: people above the 49th parallel remember they are not American.

• Labour Day: the recognition of labour by not labouring.

• Thanksgiving: the name says it all, but many are not sure why or to whom.

• Remembrance Day: a too-short silence to think long enough about what we lost and how we got there. Vicars and reverends still get seats of honour on this day.

• Christmas Day: the birthday of the guy killed on Good Friday. Also known as the day before the world junior hockey championships or the day of rest before Boxing Day shopping.

• Boxing Day: marking with glee that stores are open again. (Yet the root of this holiday is the giving of goodwill “boxes” to the less fortunate. It was set aside for giving, not consuming. Novel idea.)

This brief survey of holidays reveals how terribly behind these post-Christian times we are. After all, the majority are founded on the Christian religion. Why all these Christian holidays remain—if only in name—is intriguing. And the fact that we are now at least acknowledging special days of other religions, including Ramadan and Kwanza, increases the peculiarity of the paradox. If religion is so private and passé, why the increased publicity?

Why all these Christian holidays remain—if only in name—is intriguing.

Don’t you see? Canadian culture, increasingly shaped by gods of self and mammon and the religion of secularism, is undergoing a subtle transformation. Our holidays tell the tale. In fact, they tell new tales—Earth Day, for example. What and how we celebrate ultimately shapes us.

In the early centuries A.D., Roman festivals like Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (“the birthday of the unconquered sun”) was redefined by Christians. They used the existing culture to tell the story of the Saviour and, by golly, it worked famously.

The same shift Christianity once visited upon the Roman Empire is happening again, only in reverse.

This is no argument for state-sanctioned Christian observance. Rather, it is a wake-up call from our holiday slumber as we celebrate a very Good Friday and history-shattering Easter. Of all holidays, these are the most brash, for they invite public scrutiny of the very basis for Christian hope: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (I Corinthians 15:17).

Everything hinges on Good Friday and Easter. The days defy reason and human religious indifference, but then again God has always done that. So, for the sake of our culture losing its memory and bowing before gods that are not God, Christians must holiday boldly and declare unashamedly that the Lord is risen indeed. Alone among the tombs and burial mounds of this world, his has been abandoned and left behind. We who holy-day—not holiday—are keepers of this old, old story that is new again.