Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
How do you celebrate late fall holidays? What memories do these celebrations evoke for you of holidays past? How do you manage your energy when the season seems to be full of business parties, family gatherings, and year-end business (or semester-end) deadlines?
As students were leaving the management class I teach on Tuesday, November 24, I wished them a “Happy Thanksgiving”. Based on my previous blog post “My Thanksgiving Ritual” it’s obvious that the holiday is important for me. Giving thanks, being with family and friends, eating special foods around giving thanks is the most meaningful celebration of my year. Yet, Thanksgiving the holiday is not that important for everyone.
The Tuesday after Thanksgiving, I asked a student intern in the Management Department, “How was your Thanksgiving?” She told me that she and her family don’t celebrate Thanksgiving; they are Muslim and enjoyed a traditional feast on the following day.
As co-chair of the NYC Employee Assistance Professional Association (EAPA)-Women’s Issues Committee, I recently helped to facilitate a discussion on the many ways that the holidays are celebrated at this time of year. We talked about Christmas and the joy of singing carols, we talked about Hanukkah and the meaning of gelt, we talked about Kawanzaa and the rituals that were developed in 1966 by Rod Karenga.
One of our members quietly spoke up to say that Christmas was a very special holiday for her family. It wasn’t about a tree, the food, the presents. Their marking of the holiday was spiritual and about the religious meaning and their being together as a family.
Memories both wonderful and traumatic surface at this time of year. The time dad was drunk and knocked over the Christmas tree or hit a child, the times both your parents made spectacles of themselves at a party, the inability to get out of a truly dysfunctional home to be with neighbors in their peaceful home. Memories that can fade when they are replaced with new memories by meaningful sharing with significant others.
We—well, I know I do—seem to travel at a faster pace during the holidays, moving around like the Energizer Bunny. From Thanksgiving Eve watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloons get blown up to the time the ball drops in Time Square on New Year’s Eve, we are surrounded by a marketing assault to buy, buy, buy and special discount prices in ads that seem to be everywhere, music in lobbys and department stores that doesn’t always put you in the holiday mood because it’s not the holiday you celebrate, and the bills that come due for the gifts you charge.
My holiday shopping done when I was in Tuolumne County over Thanksgiving, my joy now is to celebrate the light I find in this season by giving final marks to my wonderful students who moved out of their comfort zones to learn about organizational behavior from me, getting together with friends to exchange thoughtful gifts, baking of a carrot cake for the staff at my gym, and soaking in the bright lights of the breathtaking decorations all around Manhattan.
However you mark this season of holidays, I wish you a universal message of health, love, and peace.
