I don't understand St. Patrick's Day. I mean I understand belligerence. But when did Saint Patrick really become the patron saint of throwing up in the middle of a body shot? As far as I can tell getting wasted does not constitute a legitimate holiday. Which is not to say I won't take part. Only that the holiday no longer carries any significance. And a lot of holidays have gone this way, towards booze and revelry. It's to the point where we take the two words as synonyms, revelry and holiday.

But I'm confident holidays aren't dead. They exist in the family room and to the individual they exist in memory, they exist in traditions and the desire to pass on. It's to the individual and to the family and to the group to define a holiday, it's never been so much about a national sentiment because we are not celebrating with a nation, but with our household and those we keep closest. And to this we make our holidays unique. We invent customs and individualize the experience and build on the meaning of a single holiday from year to year. Holidays are defined by memory and if the memories are painful than the annual significance will continue to diminish unless something reinvigorates it. I remember once a terrible family fight during Christmas eve and I hardly look forward to the celebration at all anymore. It's gone and I hope not for ever. But Thanksgiving is still there and seeing my cousins from year to year is as exactly the same now as it was when we were five sneaking around the basement in our sleeping bags after bedtime.

Holidays are felt most strongly the night before. I gauge my own feelings towards a holiday by the excitement leading up to it. And by those standards Halloween takes the cake. Halloween makes children out of adults and monsters out of children.  It's the one true day of the year where the abnormal and absurd becomes the rule.  Halloween is the epitome of holiday itself because it forces the celebration out of both the physical office and the conceptual one. And it's hard to escape until the sun comes up and the world looks so oddly familiar and somehow not.

Holidays are most definitely an important part of life, even if you remove from the word any connotation and just think of it is as a day off. If I didn't have the weekends I would explode. But even beyond that I"ll skip a day of whatever every so often and see what the world looks like on any given day. We need these brief respites if only to preserve our sanity. We need them because they put our memory to work, they invite us briefly into a world that does not always belong to us, so when it does shouldn't we cherish it all the more?

Vacations remind us that we really have very few responsibilities. Intrinsically we have none. So take a day off and take a walk and remember that the world can be pretty relaxing when you let it be.