02.17.07

My Non-Denominational List of Top Ten Holidays and Festivals

Posted in Festivals and Celebrations, Local Customs at 4:20 am by Benjamin Ross

In less than 24 hours, Fuzhou will transform into a veritable war zone as an arsenal of firecrackers explodes on every street, hallway, and inch of space in town, signaling the final moments of the year of the dog (last year it was the end of the year of the cock) and welcoming in the year of the pig. This is the beginning of what was probably, before the international whoring of Christmas, humanity’s most widely observed celebration, the Chinese Spring Festival. The best analogy I can provide for Spring Festival is that it is like New Years, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July all wrapped into a 15 day-celebration. During Spring Festival it is tradition for Chinese people to return to their hometowns, eat a glutinous New Year’s feast with their families, light a lot of fireworks, and watch the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, China’s own version of the Super Bowl, except there is no football, and the commercials suck.

Leftover Spring Festival carnage in a stairwell in Fujian.

Spring Festival for me also marks the traumatic finale of a massive season of Chinese, Western, American, Jewish, and Christian holidays, all of which generally necessitate some form of multi-cultural party or get-together when you are a foreigner living in China. The festivities began with Thanksgiving, then my birthday (Dec. 18), Christmas, Hanukkah, New Years, Valentine’s Day and now Spring Festival, not to mention my friends’ Clarence and Mandy’s engagement celebrations. All of this partying and celebrating got me thinking…Not all holidays are created equal. When I broke down all of the holidays and festivals which I encounter on a yearly basis, I come up with a fair collection of winners and duds. Here they are, My Non-Denominational List of Top Ten Holidays and Festivals.

10. Mid-Autumn Day

Mid-Autumn Day is the Chinese equivalent of a diluted Thanksgiving, except there are no Pilgrims, no Indians, and no blankets intentionally infected with small pox. But it’s the multi-flavored moon cakes which propel Mid-Autumn Day onto the list.

9. July 4^th

Just as the Spring Festival is better observed in China’s countryside, there is nothing like July 4^th and a place with a lot of country folk, such as…say…Missouri. Never mind that today our country’s values put world security in jeopardy, Independence Day is still all about the beer, the fireworks, and the ol’ stars and stripes.

8. Wacking Day

Okay, so maybe it was only invented on The Simpsons, but is there anything negative to say about a day where mob mentality rules and angry crowds prowl the streets with sticks beating the life out of the city’s snake population?

7. Yom Kippur

You might find it strange I have included such a solemn day on my list of Top Holidays and Festivals, but there are few concepts more cross-culturally applicable than dedicating one day a year to fasting, and repenting for all of the sins you committed throughout the year. This concept transcends religious beliefs, and it is the only Jewish holiday I regularly observe in China.

6. Your 21^st birthday (applies for Americans only)

This isn’t technically a holiday or festival, but Americans love to abuse alcohol, and there is never a better reason to celebrate than the day where you can actually drink for the first time, legally? My 21^st birthday was on a Monday night, and to this day I have yet to level that night’s levels of intoxication. Non-Americans simply don’t know the feeling.

5. New Year’s Eve (Western)

The Chinese New Year may be more multi-dimensional, but there is no bigger party than New Years Eve in the West.

4. Thanksgiving

Family, food, and football, nothing is more wholesome and American, and that’s why the final Thursday in November has always been on my list. A bantering John Madden with a turkey leg in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other doesn’t hurt either.

3. Spring Festival/Chinese New Year

You’ve heard the stereotypes, and they’re right on the money. Chinese food is great, and fireworks are plentiful in the land of chopsticks. What could be better than wrapping it all together under the backdrop of a family reunion? Spring Festival’s a keeper.

2. Halloween

When Chinese people ask me about my favorite “American” holidays Halloween is always the first to come to mind. Whether it’s going out trick-or-treating, having a drunken costume party, or just staying home with the Frankenstein and Osama bin Laden masks, handing out candy to children, Halloween is a pagan festival that people of all ages can enjoy.

1. Shabbat

It might sound cliché, but to me, the granddaddy of them all is the one that occurs 52 times a year. Shabbat is the Jewish day of rest, but not just rest in the physical sense. Shabbat is the day to clear the mind of all the pressures which otherwise cloud it 6 days a week. It’s a day to leave work and technology behind, and instead focus on what makes us human, our communities, our thoughts, and depending on your beliefs, the man upstairs.

Honorable Mention

St. Patrick’s Day. Is there any group of people other than the Irish which throws a better party in honor of their own nationalism and pride? If Jews did that, the whole day would consist of eating kougal and fixing up the younger generation on blind dates.

Not all holidays made the Top 10, and frankly some celebrations are simply overrated in my book, so now we have the Top 5 List of Most Overrated Holidays and Festivals.

5. Columbus Day

Christopher Columbus was a raider and a tyrant, who in the process of spreading syphilis and raping Indian women, managed to discover a land which had already been discovered 500 years before. Celebrating Columbus Day in America is like celebrating Dick Cheney Day in Baghdad.

4. Labor Day/National Day (China)

Several years ago the Chinese government decided to give the people two “golden weeks” per year in order to encourage traveling and spending. The result is that most of China’s tourism is occurs during these two weeks, making any worthwhile tourist attraction, pathetically unattractive during this time period. What’s worse, people have to go to work on the weekend before the holiday, so each “golden week” in reality nets only 3 days off.

3. Labor Day/Memorial Day (US)

Can anybody seriously tell me the last time you did something to honor either labor or fallen soldiers which didn’t involve jet skiing or golf. These “holidays” should both be renamed “National Get the Day off Work and Go Vacationing in the Ozarks/Hamptons/Mountains Day.”

2. Hanukkah

Christmas ain’t all that great, and Hanukkah is Christmas’s little bastard Jewish cousin. What was originally a holiday no more significant that President’s Day, has now, under the influence of Christmas, become one of the most over-hyped Jewish festivals on the calendar. I’ll take Pesach over Hanukkah any day.

1. Christmas

As a Jew, I’m a little biased, but I’ve never been a big fan of Christmas. What was originally the celebration of the birth of a man who healed the sick and died for the sins of his followers, has evolved into a frenzy of materialism and overspending. Americans now spend more money each year on Christmas than the entire GDP of Namibia. (sources available upon request)

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