Holidays and Relationships

Holiday initially was derived from the longer term holy day, involving a relationship with a spiritual deity. The word now encompasses a range of secular, national, and religious celebrations inherently linked with personal relationships. Indeed, in the modern United States, spending a holiday alone is considered by many to be the pinnacle of isolation. Different holidays include different rituals, social partners, and types of relationships. Holidays provide a forum for explicating the nature of relationships. Celebrating a given holiday together can define the degree of intimacy between social partners. Some holidays expand social networks, whereas other holidays demarcate boundaries around close ties. Holidays also provide a sense of continuity and rhythm that allow for shared reminiscence and common bonds, particularly within families. Shifts in patterns of celebration can indicate transitions within those relationships. Finally, because holidays make explicit those aspects of relationships that may typically go unstated, holidays can generate intense emotions. This entry explains how holidays provide definition and continuity in relationships and how individuals may react to those celebrations.

The range of celebrations and festivities mimics the range of personal relationships in the modern world. Holidays help define ties between people, with some holidays encompassing a wide array of social ties, and other holidays limited to the closest ties. For example, a Christmas card list may include intimate, acquaintance, past, and business ties. Likewise, people celebrate national festivals such as the U.S. 4th of July with a conglomerate of friends, friends-of-friends, neighbors, and picnic lovers. By contrast, Thanksgiving brings together extended family, whereas an anniversary is a personal holiday, circumscribed to the two people in that relationship. Some holidays, such as birthdays, are semiprivate. Individuals presume a degree of intimacy with people who send a birthday card or gift.

Personalizing holidays can also establish intimate relationships or define cycles within those relationships. For example, romantic couples may create holidays to commemorate important moments in the relationship, such as eating annually at a certain restaurant. During the development of the romantic tie, negotiations over how to spend holidays typically celebrated with family (e.g., Thanksgiving) may formalize the relationship. Childrearing also often entails the institution of new holidays or personalizing existing holidays to reinforce the family as a unit. Families may engage in a formal rite of definition such as the family reunion, or they may generate idiosyncratic holidays such as the annual camping trip, an ice cream party on the first day of school, or even the Pie Day one family dreamed up.

Holidays also generate discontinuity from the normal routines of daily life in favor of rituals or celebrations. Holidays recur on a cyclical basis, usually each year. In the modern world, we tend to conceptualize time as linear, viewing individuals and relationships as developing and changing. Holidays can facilitate this progression and further strengthen ties. For example, birthdays indicate the growth of a child and shifts in relationships with that child, whereas anniversaries mark the duration of a marriage. Yet, holidays also introduce cycles within relationships and generate feelings of continuity. The annual nature of the rituals is reassuring and may ground the relationship.

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