Do you think never celebrating holidays such as Christmas or birthdays would have a strong effect on the psychological development of our children? My partner and I intend to avoid celebrating any conventional holidays, except for Halloween, and to celebrate the Solstices and Equinoxes instead.
Would you be up for saying more about why you don’t want to celebrate the conventional holidays? Your kids are likely going to want to celebrate the things their friends and extended family are celebrating, and unless you have a strong reason not to, might as well make them happy?
For example, despite being atheists we celebrate Christmas, Easter, Hanukkah, and Passover. Not in an especially religious way, just things like dying eggs and looking for them are fun.
Jeff—I agree. I think there are lots of design features of these traditional holidays that look irrational, outdated, and silly from an adult’s point of view, but that suddenly make sense when you have kids enjoying them.
Kids seem to have a deep hunger for ‘special times’, holidays, and celebrations, when the normal routines are set aside, and parents make special efforts to interact with extended family, neighbors, and friends, and when there are special foods, feasts, activities, and gift-giving. My speculation is that in hunter-gatherer times, collective feasts and holidays sent kids reliable cues that ‘things are going well with our tribe’, and kids like that. If kids are deprived of these special times, they might implicitly get cues that ‘our tribe is poor, failing, under threat, and not likely to last very long’, which could make them anxious and sad.
Would you be up for saying more about why you don’t want to celebrate the conventional holidays? Your kids are likely going to want to celebrate the things their friends and extended family are celebrating, and unless you have a strong reason not to, might as well make them happy?
For example, despite being atheists we celebrate Christmas, Easter, Hanukkah, and Passover. Not in an especially religious way, just things like dying eggs and looking for them are fun.
Jeff—I agree. I think there are lots of design features of these traditional holidays that look irrational, outdated, and silly from an adult’s point of view, but that suddenly make sense when you have kids enjoying them.
Kids seem to have a deep hunger for ‘special times’, holidays, and celebrations, when the normal routines are set aside, and parents make special efforts to interact with extended family, neighbors, and friends, and when there are special foods, feasts, activities, and gift-giving. My speculation is that in hunter-gatherer times, collective feasts and holidays sent kids reliable cues that ‘things are going well with our tribe’, and kids like that. If kids are deprived of these special times, they might implicitly get cues that ‘our tribe is poor, failing, under threat, and not likely to last very long’, which could make them anxious and sad.