Growing in Joy through Family Feast Days
A practical philosophy of minor celebrations
Dear Friends,
Celebration is an important part of human life.
We need normal, ordinary days; we need days of extra-hard work or even restriction (in the liturgical sense, days of fasting or penance); and we need—we need—times of feasting, merriment, and celebration.
This is how human beings thrive.
But celebrations are still somehow often quite hard on us. Traditions (often good ones) and, alas, the dictates of marketing firms give us plenty of guidelines for celebrating things like birthdays and major holidays. And we also have relatives and acquaintances and social media influencers and other self-confident people to tell us what they think we ought to do. But this doesn’t always lead to a joyful celebration. Instead, sometimes circumstances can cause even a major feast to begin to feel like a fast, and that which should be a pleasure may begin to mimic a penance instead.
Unfortunately, this isn’t just a holiday problem. An awful lot of us go around acting pretty worn down much of the time, snapping at each other and our children and generally just being grouchy for lack of something or another. For as the pressures mount and the days are filled with stressors (bills and strep throat and backaches and Mom! Dad! The dog just puked on the carpet again!), cheerfulness diminishes and, despite the luxuries of modern life, we can even begin to forget that such things as merriment, enjoyment, and appreciation exist (at least until the next major holiday and its mixture of stress and recreation reappears). Our ordinary days can become weighed down as we push forward in a society that is not oriented toward emotionally healthy living.
In light of this, I’d like to suggest a possibility for increasing joy and celebration in your family life without adding pressure or burden. What I have in mind is the practice of establishing and celebrating family feast days.
What is a family feast day?
A family feast day is any day that you wish to mark annually with special joy. In my family, most of these days have some religious significance. For example, we celebrate each family member’s baptismal anniversary, as well as the feast days (“name days”) of the saints whose names we bear. For us, celebrating sacramental anniversaries or name days helps to ground us in the reality that we are supported by grace and that we are not alone, but are part of a living communion of saints.
But family feast days can also have other significance: the day Mom and Dad got engaged, or the first day of spring, or the first day of school each year, or a late grandparent’s birthday, or whatever might have special meaning to your family.
In other words, it can be whenever you want it to be.
For here is the key: the wonderful thing about celebrating family feast days is that there are no outsized expectations or unhelpful traditions to create pressure, guilt, or shame and turn something that ought to be joyful into a source of distress. After all, it’s all well and good to say to someone, “On Christmas Day, just do whatever makes you joyful,” but the reality is that on such a major cultural occasion as Christmas, we do have real duties toward other people (especially relatives). While we need to make wise decisions about these major celebrations, these are community observances and we need to consider others as well as our own households. But unlike such major holidays, family feast days can be freely designed to give joy without adding stress or creating dilemmas.
Of course, if you really want to, you can find all sort of declarations online about How to Celebrate Name Days, but really, you should just do whatever you want. You don’t have to please anyone outside of your own four walls. For example, if you and your household enjoy choosing, giving, and receiving gifts, you might mark a child’s baptismal anniversary with some sort of special religious gift. For a while, I did this for my godchildren, as a matter of fact, and it was really nice.
On the other hand, maybe buying gifts is stressful for you (or your budget) or receiving them makes you uncomfortable. Well, that’s fine, too! You may find that you prefer to write a little card or have a special plate that you use for breakfast on each of these days, or do something like lighting the person’s baptismal candle at dinner.
In other words, while some people give gifts on name days and have special first day of school outfit traditions and always have rainbow sprinkle whipped cream chocolate chip cheesecake pancakes on solstice mornings and do all sorts of special things for their family feast days, in your own family and on your own feast days that you have chosen, you can do whatever you like best and find to be easiest! In my house, for example, on each of your feast days you get to pick dinner and dessert and everybody says Happy Feast Day to you a whole bunch of times throughout the day and is very happy for you. Dad might find time to play an extra game of chess with you, or you might discover someone has made your bed for you while you were lingering over your coffee.
And that’s it. You don’t get the moon.
But gosh, we’re happy on that day, and we have cookies or pie, or maybe ice cream, and we’re all reminded of how much we love each other. We have a little spring in our step. And although it requires very little of the rest of the family to arrange to pick up a special gallon of ice cream from the store or give a few extra hugs, it feels very special to the person who is being celebrated. Everyone needs to receive a little pick-me-up every once in a while, to be reminded freely and happily that they bring their family joy.
Maybe you want to do more than my family does, or maybe you want to do less. Go ahead! You are free. You have permission to live these days with joy, knowing that your children (and spouse!) do not need you to overexert yourself, but truly do need to see evidence that you enjoy and appreciate them at moments throughout the year. They will feel loved when you show them that they bring you joy, and that celebrating with them is a happy thing.
So I encourage you to consider adding these little family celebrations that are characterized by freedom, enjoyment, and a little sparkle of happiness but are free from burdens and overexertion. With six people in my family, we have around fifteen of these days sprinkled throughout the year, and they really do tend to go off without a hitch most of the time. They are minor, but they are special to us because they are about who we are together.
And you can’t beat that for rekindling joy.
“And that’s it. You don’t get the moon.” This made me laugh! I love the realism. It’s so nice to think about celebrating things without pressure!
This is lovely. I’m going to send this to my wife and
see if we can’t come up with an idea of our own!