Today is Boxing Day, which means, er, well I don’t know what it means. It is rather like the Jewish festival of Purim, which a lot of Jews aren’t sure about either – as far as I can make out from the wonderful Christopher Guest film For Your Consideration, a spoof on film awards that features the disastrous nominee Home for Purim.
Thinking of Boxing Day leads me to consider our national festivals. After today, (in no particular order) there’s Shrove Tuesday, Easter, Fireworks Night, May Day and, if you’re a pagan or a Wiccan, the solstices. We’ve even imported a few – Chinese New Year and the Americanised version of Halloween come to mind, plus Burns Night and St Paddy’s Day if you are of a Celtic or Gaelic disposition. You could throw in Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day if you like, but these are celebrations aimed at individuals rather than familial.
It’s wonderful watching the fireworks with the children on my shoulders, walking the streets to beg for sweets on Halloween, sharing food on the Christmas dinner, dancing round the maypole on – well, maybe not, but you get my drift. These celebratory days are like magnetic forces that draw people together who are otherwise far flung. They are familial coagulants, in a world where people are otherwise increasingly disconnected and atomised. This is perhaps why we are adding more and more to our roster. National Book Day has kids dressing up as characters out of their favourite books. Red Nose Day has people, um, wearing red noses. We can’t get enough of collective celebration.
It always has struck me that Britain has not nearly enough ceremonies and rituals. You can hardly get through a week in some Spanish-speaking cities without a celebration of some saint or martyr or other. It usually gets merged with a lot of communal dancing and families drinking and eating. In my brother’s city, New Orleans, the festival is almost permanent. It’s the Catholics’ way of inoculating against isolation.
Although we can’t import that culture into Britain, we could come up with a few more festivals of our own. We are pretty pathetic at celebrating St George’s Day, for instance, since it has somehow became wrapped up in overtones of jingoism, colonialism and racism. Or we could just rebrand it Shakespeare Day as it’s the same spot on the calendar, and have the community performing Shakespeare plays in local halls or the streets, or singing songs from the plays.
The point is, we need more spots on the calendar when we can all genuinely get together – and any excuse, as far as I’m concerned, will do. It’s not easy to invent celebrations and rituals but in a sense we are doing just that with all the “days” that companies and charities are always coming up with – National Mental Health Day, National Breast Cancer Day, etc, etc. Why not extend the concept, only root it more in our culture and history?
The day that slavery was abolished in the UK – 1 August – might make a great day to give everyone a day off school or work, and tip a nod of respect to all the colonial subjugants who so handily, and unwillingly, helped create the wealth we enjoy today. Or there could be Industrial Revolution Day, in which children have to invent an interesting machine, or DNA Day, in which we could celebrate our ancestors through the discoveries of Crick and Watson.
But with enough willpower and government support, we can generate days that have the potential to become more than marketing or PR campaigns by charities or corporations. Collective public celebration is immensely valuable – in a sense it’s what all the economic growth is actually for – to get together on special days and celebrate. Even if, as with Boxing Day, we aren’t quite sure what those days stand for.
