By Maria Padhila
I’ve been lucky when it comes to holidays. For most of my life, I could ignore them.
Until the past few years, I worked in a field that never shut down, so I had the ready-made excuse of having to work on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. I’m a pagan, so my holiday is the Solstice. (One of my friends has an annual joke: It’s the pagan Christmas!) Sometimes I stay up all night for a ritual; a few years ago, Isaac took our daughter for a week with the grandparents and I had a five-night ritual that probably led to some of the biggest changes in my life so far.
But as sacred as these occasions might be, they don’t involve sitting in overheated rooms with people who don’t really want to talk to me and are wishing they could just watch football and eating too much of food that could be toxic with hormones and additives. If I do happen to get a few days to myself without work or child, I gorge myself, all right — on theater, every show I can get a discount ticket to.
Isaac was raised a Jewish atheist, and his family never felt the least obligation to do a thing around Saturnalia. It was beautifully freeing. We worked on Christmas (he has a job that goes 24/7/365), everyone felt sorry for us, and we felt smug and got extra days off when we really wanted them, instead. I could ignore New Year’s — a night I guess you’re supposed to spend in an overpriced reek of bad sparkling wine and dull music, honoring a turn in a calendar that bears no resemblance to the Earth’s seasons — by babysitting. All taken care of.