Solving the Problem of Holiday

Solving the Problem of Holiday Traffic

Every year in the United States, the highways and airports get incredibly congested at very predictable times. In fact, it happens like clockwork by the calendar because everybody gets holiday vacation time off from work and school at the same time. Meanwhile, most of the holidays that are the basis of those vacations have lost their original meaning and become excuses for commercial enterprises to schedule sales to generate revenue.

In contemporary times, many holidays have completely lost their original spiritual religious, spiritual, or patriotic significance altogether, becoming little more than marks on calendars to which hard-working people look forward because they represent vacations. That is especially true from the point-of-view of retailers who fully expect to make most of their annual profits in between Thanksgiving and the pre-Christmas holiday shopping season.

Furthermore, to make matters worse, vehicular accidents cause more injuries and death during the holiday seasons than during any other time, partly because more people drink and drive after holiday-related parties and partly because there are so many more cars on the road. In that regard, holidays like Christmas, New Years, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Labor Day in particular are always the deadliest times of year on American highways. As result, holidays often become a time of family tragedy instead of joy.

Air travel often becomes miserable and all but impossible during those times of year because so many overbooked flights are delayed that airports become ridiculously congested, taking much of the pleasure out of holiday vacations for everyone. Moreover, within many families, holiday planning and festivities often cause as much unpleasantness as they provide joy, simply because families also follow the established social trend of getting together for holidays despite the fact that there may be significant underlying problems and serious issues between various members of the family.

In many cases, the holiday obligation is the only reason that family members see each other when they might otherwise not necessarily want to. Finally, rates of depression and suicide both spike during the holiday season, largely because there is so much social expectation (if not intentional "pressure") for everyone to have "holiday plans" with family that many of those people who are not fortunate enough to have families experience the most depression at that time of year.

The Solution:

Generally, most peoples' main concern about holidays is simply the time off from work. Therefore, instead of giving everybody the same calendar days off every year, it might make much more sense to give everybody the choice of when to take holidays. That way, families could coordinate their schedules and plan family get-togethers just as they do now, except that they would be able to travel without worrying about traffic and airport congestion that makes holiday travel such a nightmare when everybody travels at the same time.

If anything, that approach to holidays would increase their meaning in several ways rather than reducing their meaning. Today, Christmas, Father's Day and Mother's Day in particular have become so commercialized that they have lost most of their underlying meaning. For example, every Christmas season, millions of Americans endure miserable conditions shopping to complete their Christmas lists. Meanwhile, everybody on their lists goes through the exact same thing reciprocally. Instead of giving meaningful gifts to one another, this process has become a ritualized obligatory exchange of gifts of approximately equal value that often completely detracts from any real warmth or meaningfulness of the gifts. In essence, it would make more sense for people to buy their own gifts for themselves every Christmas season; at least that would decrease the dissatisfaction and the need to return unwanted gifts for a refund or store credit.

If families celebrated their own private "Christmas" or "Thanksgiving" at random times chosen by family consensus, the exchange of gifts would have much greater meaning because only people relatively close to one another (outside of their families) would ever be aware when other people celebrated their holidays. Nobody would have to worry about offending mere acquaintances or work associates by ignoring them during the holidays because holidays and the exchange of gifts associated with some of them would be a much more private matter that had meaning behind it instead of an automatic, blind social ritual of conformity.