One holy holiday not secularized
Halloween is past, and, like a parade, down the road are coming Thanksgiving and Christmas. If you're Swedish, like me, there's also St. Lucia Day. That's a lot of holidays in a short period of time, and we're ignoring the truly secular celebrations: Columbus Day and Veterans Day.
The word "holiday" has its origins in "holy day," and skeptics like to claim that our society celebrates too many Christian ones, but the skeptics have come up with a very effective way of neutralizing that: they simply commandeer the dates for themselves.
All-Hallows Eve once was a religious observance, albeit a strongly superstitious one, that led to All Saints Day the next morning. Now Halloween tends to celebrate evil without the All Saints Day counterbalance, and it is the second largest retail extravaganza of the year, second only to Christmas. The Christian emphasis of Halloween is virtually nonexistent; in fact, many 21st century Christians are trying to avoid Halloween completely.
While the first United States version of Thanksgiving was a harvest festival, it also carried a strong religious overtone. Now, as a friend of mine once observed, it is a time when "we celebrate the bounty of God by seeing how much of it we can consume at a single sitting." (Gluttony, by the way, is one of the "deadly sins!")
After dinner we have a glut of pro and college football games to watch on television while digesting our food. The next day the stores open at 5 a.m. for the single largest retail sales day of the year!
Christmas, of course, has been effectively lost in a commercial tsunami. The spiritual side has been drowned by materialism, while Jesus has been replaced by Santa Claus and the wise men by reindeer and elves. And don't even think about singing Christmas carols in the schools or playing religious music over the public address system in city parks!
Easter still belongs to Jesus, but he has to fight fiercely against the Easter Bunny. New clothes and Easter eggs and baskets capture much more attention than do sunrise services.
Not that Christians are blameless in this regard. We fall in with the crowd and celebrate the wrong things just like our neighbors do. We are equally guilty of losing touch with the real meaning of the holidays.
Christians can't even celebrate the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus without secular competition. That holy day occurs on Jan. 1, which also happens to be New Year's Day. Most Christians already have secularized the event, spending the first day of the new year recovering from the night (and year) before and watching football until it's hard to know whether the red eyes are television or hangover related. The tithe, which should go to church, goes instead to the pizza shop.
It's still possible to celebrate the Day of Ascension without secular interference. NASA hasn't decided to stage an annual satellite launch on that day, and hot air balloonists aren't turning it into their special day, either. That may change if Christians go public with their enthusiasm for levitation, but perhaps we can have secret rituals and hide it for a while.
It's just a thought.