Instead of having time to become bored, as it were, with resting and naturally begetting excitement for an upcoming event, we instead have no time amid the general rush to keep up with commercial demands. We find ourselves constantly too busy—not only for meaningful connection with other humans, but for celebrating holidays, living seasonally, and connecting with our own bodies. All around us and within us we can see the mess that this creates. 

The wisdom of the seasons is undeniable if we but take a moment to consider it. Such wisdom may be forgotten in this age, when we can drive to our supermarket and pick out any type of fruit we want because it is globally procured. It is trampled, too, by the landslide of commercialism that rushes ahead to money-making holidays at a faster and faster pace. Some stores were displaying Christmas decorations by mid-September. It would be almost unthinkable, except that it’s happened. 

And, yet, the seasons still prove an immovable force. September and October will always be the bulk of the harvest in most of the northern hemisphere and Western culture. The push to start wearing sweaters and drinking pumpkin spice lattes in late August, when everyone is tired of sweating, is not going to make cooler days come any faster. People will simply be perspiring more in their heavy, mostly-polyester sweaters until the rotational tilt of the earth shifts. The date of Christmas and the Winter Solstice will not occur any sooner if we drop November’s Martinmas harvest and American Thanksgiving in the mud and opt for full blown “Happy Holiday” (a.k.a. Christmas) decorations by November 1st. Spring is a little harder to ruin because—no matter how we try—we can’t force the snow to melt or plant our seedlings any earlier, even if the secular culture brings out eggs and bunnies before Lent is properly on its way. 

Of course we can ask why certain holidays like Thanksgiving have all but disappeared under mass consumerism, while we still see evidence of Halloween and Christmas. The sidelining of all harvest festivals in favor of a generic ‘fall’ is its own side discussion, but a simple point of reflection is that harvest festivals and their corresponding Catholic feasts have disappeared because the harvest is a non-existent experience when modern man’s experience of food is tied to the supermarket rather than agriculture. We cannot reconstruct the seasons even by rushing each season’s superficial associations

Instead, we can observe three results. First, the dizzying speed at which we push forward to each new holiday—only to immediately forget it on the day it ends, so that we may rush on to the next with no time or anticipation in between—leads to a complete exhaustion of the soul. The body, too, ends up gasping for relief because the entire purpose of a holiday—in opposition to the consumerist approach—is a day set apart for festival time, worship, and leisure. The word ‘holiday’ itself comes from ‘holy day.’ The sad outcome is that ever more people each year are abandoning holiday festivities and traditions simply because the joy and energy has disappeared due to the secular rush. “Recuperative rest and cheerful play seem to be necessary for life,” declares Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics. It is no wonder that festivity diminishes when our holidays lack meaningful culture and offer no pause from modern marketing and the workaday grind. As Josef Pieper so astutely states in his Leisure the Basis of Culture:

The meaning of celebration, we have said, is man’s affirmation of the universe and his experiencing the world in an aspect other than its everyday one … nothing illustrates so clearly that festivity is only possible where divine worship is still a vital act—and nothing shows this so clearly as a comparison between a living and deeply traditional feast day, with its roots in divine worship, and one of those rootless celebrations, carefully and unspontaneously prepared beforehand, and as artificial as a maypole.

Where Pieper has referenced “Brutus Days” and Labor Day, we might add the secular takeover of Halloween or St. Valentine’s Day. 

Second, the constant rush to each new event destroys the body’s biological rhythm. Women’s bodies are a good example of this. They go through an entire four seasons of rhythm every month in their cycle. Rushing one, or missing another, is one of the causes leading to fertility issues, of which we are seeing an enormous rise today. It’s the same with the rhythm of the year. We have seasons for a reason.

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