I feel like Adraste missed two obvious counterpoints at the end there.
First, does anyone actually have the same level of sentiment about Columbus Day as they do about Christmas? As Beroe himself pointed out, it's an artificial holiday that was invented relatively recently. Not only is there a positive side effect of replacing it, but the negatives are almost certainly much lower.
Second, Columbus Day is a *federal* holiday. I think there's actually quite a good argument for replacing the federal holiday of Christmas with a secular alternative, since the government really shouldn't be endorsing a particular religion. Christians would still have their day off to celebrate Christmas the same as always and non-Christians can at least nominally be included by Winter Day or whatever. It's not like Christmas would be abolished, the government would just be taking a slightly more neutral stance toward it. Similarly, if people out there genuinely do celebrate Columbus Day, renaming it while retaining its status as a federal holiday lets those people still celebrate it while also allowing the US government to be nominally more inclusive to Native American citizens who justifiably hate Columbus's guts.
Put another way, I disagree with Beroe's point that we'll end up with sterile and meaningless holidays. *Federal* holidays could easily become sterile and meaningless, but they already kind of are. Real holidays will be celebrated exactly as long as people care about them.
Dana: Coria, you have a good idea, but you're completely failing to understand the point of holidays. As Beroe said, they're about *myths*. They're about us, the living. Family and togetherness and gratitude. Gifts and joy and light. Renewal and hope and unsubtle metaphors. You can't just take a whole list of the most important figures: you need to start with the archetypes, the emotional goals, the *vibes*, and once you've assigned those, warp some reasonably close historical figures until they fit. Now, we'll toss Sanger, because that's complicated, and we're left with Columbus, Einstein, Edison, Washington, MLK, Disney, Franklin, Jonas Salk, Norman Borlaug, Susan B Anthony, and Louis Armstrong. Exploration, genius, dedication and entrepreneurship, bravery and honor, sticking to convictions in the face of overwhelming provocation, entertainment and joy, science and statesmanship (and we'll stick this one where Easter used to be), moral courage and innovation, and art. That's a pretty good list! But Salk and Borlaug take basically the same place, and that's already covered by Franklin. So as much as I respect your desire to honor the best and most important Americans, I can't agree with it. This is, incidentally, an argument for Henriette Lacks: she adds a theme and a tone that a list exclusively of the great and powerful can never capture.
The Modernist list (echoes of Comte, really) suggests we should create and celebrate the mythical character Armstrong, jazzman and astronaut extraordinaire. I'm all for it.
Coria at least avoided the false dichotomy but came up with a worse alternative. We need a way to ensure that a new holiday would be popular enough that people would forget all about the old holiday.
I suggest a contest. Contest entries should not only name the holiday but suggest fun activities for that day. The judges should be kids. They try out contest entries by actually having the holiday and reporting back on whether it was fun.
Pretty good. The only (minor) omission I think is the observation of the annoyance of the narcissism of the weak ally of an anti-holiday effort. If you have some personal reason to deeply hate Columbus, the historical figure -- his ancestors chopped off the hands of your ancestors, an Italian once betrayed your sister, whatever -- then I can respect your attempt to erase the man. Similarly, if you are passionately commited to the holiday because you think Italians get stereotyped as sister-betrayers too easily, or you think it concretizes the social value of honoring courage and daring (better than an "All Explorers' Day") then I can respect that, too. Banzai, and let the best shibboleth dominate by and by.
The person who is a weak ally of a holiday defense squad is being tediously tribal, but people are like that, and it's hard to expect more. But the person who is a weak ally of an anti-holiday movement is often a giant narcissist seeking attention. "You're all ignorant morons because you haven't thought of [insert tangentially relevant historical fact]. Only I with my massive brain/social conscience have seen it, and hereby bring this enlightenment to you. You may now gasp in wonder and admiration." Feh.
Bringing up Status Quo Bias in an argument about a tradition seems ridiculous to me. You can try to found a new tradition but you can't just create a pre-existing one, it will never be a tradition to the founding generation.
Beroe misses the point that Blue Tribe just got Juneteenth as a federal holiday so they can hold their horses for a bit. Personally I don't mind Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday as it was already an actual thing, and I wouldn't want it renamed to "Federal Holiday - Mid June" out of spite.
“All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites. Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre.”
I’m assuming this is a deliberate troll, but I’m still looking forward to Deiseach weighing in here. 🙂
I note that neither: “Nazis can hold rallies hailing Hitler, and when you challenge them, they can claim they’re talking about a mythical Hitler who, mythologically, did good things but not bad things.”
or: “That means that continuing to do so doesn’t pass a reversal test for status quo bias.”
includes a link to A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies. Probably for the best, even though it would be very relevant here.
Samuel Johnson's 'Debates in the Senate of Lilliput' might be the first good poet's use of 'Columban' to describe British settlements in the Americas as Columbian. Johnson was anti-colonialism all his life.
As somebody who is not a native American (and not a Native American either), I don't see a particular value for Columbus day for myself. I mean, I know about the mythos of Columbus, but if instead it'd be Benjamin Franklin day or Thomas Jefferson day or Plymouth Rock Worship day I wouldn't feel any difference.
But one thing I must object to here is that valuing the tradition by imagining its creation ex nihilo is the same as valuing it in the cultural context. If we wanted to create a human language, to be used for communication by majority of the world, be employed as pretty much unofficial official language of Science and Technology, and somebody would propose English as a candidate - they'd be laughed at, and maybe forcibly committed if they insisted. That does not imply we should spend all available effort to move away from English to some well-constructed Volapük. I am hearing some people crying out "jes ĝi faras!" right now but for the majority I think it's not the case. And if you did want to make such language, decreeing that starting Day X, every scientific paper is to be published in your favorite artificial language is probably not the best way to approach it. It would be lauded by some enthusiasts but would piss of many more people, I think, and be enormously destructive.
More and more, I believe holidays should be about celebrating and highlighting principles we value (like gratitude, generosity), not individual people or events. Ideally, they are aptly timed too, so a celebration of light comes at the darkest or brightest time of year, and a celebration of gratitude falls around harvest time.
Then, a good holiday is given color and meaning through rituals and myths that “show, don’t tell” the importance of those values and principles, and give the celebration the necessary “weight” and importance.
Christmas/New Year, Easter, Thanksgiving and many more traditional holidays got this right a long time ago (even if at least two of those have become far to dominated by the myth of the man). I don’t expect that’s because old cultures were wise enough to just know how holidays were supposed to work. I suspect it’s the other way around, that getting it right makes the holidays more sticky.
As such, I think both Colombus Day and Indigenous People’s Day fails.
So, incidentally, does 4th of July. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a good holiday, but instead of being a celebration of democracy, which maybe should have come on or near Election Day (or the other way around), it has become “big family picnic day” – which may also be important, but not as important as the thing we’re meant to celebrate.
It’s probably not a bad idea to have a holiday to celebrate adventure in the US, and one to celebrate diversity and inclusivity, and maybe a day or three to feel ashamed of how our ancestors treated each other, to commit to raise out own kids to be better than that, and to forgive each other. (And no, your particular blood line or skin tone will not get you out of that one.)
But if we want to make them sticky, let’s not name them after real, fallible people (even the best ones, like MLK), but something less vulnerable and more aspirational. Then, let’s make sure we build a structure of relevant rituals and sacrifices on top of it – and it can’t just be a parade with bag pipes. Ideally – but this is a bit much to ask of modern people – it’s something that requires a sacrifice, that brings home that the thing we value isn’t free. (No, not a bloody sacrifice. It could be a 24-hour fast, or keeping stores closed for a day, or slowing Internet down to 2G speeds for a day, or an expectation that people donate a day’s worth of work. Something relevant, though.)
When we anchor our holidays to our values, rather than specific events and individuals, we can tell myths about Columbus and his accomplishments, alongside stories about his cruelty and his inability to estimate the circumference of a globe, without celebrating him as a person. We can celebrate and share knowledge about all the peoples we want to include, in a way that can be true and real, and that fits modern and ever-evolving sensibilities.
And, over time, our stories can be filtered and the bad myths naturally replaced by better myths, that do a better job of representing the idea we want to hold on to. That will help us celebrate civil rights and democracy and shared history in a way that still allows us to tell amateur historians and contrarians to sit down, STFU and not ruin it for everybody else.
As someone who lives in a country with "early May", "late May" and "August" holidays, I assure you that having figured out the optimal number of holidays, you don't need to go on to the next step of agreeing historical figures to celebrate. You can just have holidays there.
Both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples' Day are fake holidays which, as far as I can tell, lack proper rites, as if people can just raise a mental flag to say "I'm celebrating Columbus" or "I'm celebrating indigenous peoples". Just give people the day off. If they happen to feel like celebrating something particular on the occasion, then they may.
"In the very unlikely chance that, a hundred years from now, the descendants of Aztecs are powerful and privileged, but the descendants of their sacrificial victims are marginalized..."
This really helped clarify for me why I like the dialogue format so much: if the author is arguing a straw man, it's much easier to identify in a dialogue format than in a traditional essay argument type argument (I found I understood how I disagreed with Plato more when his straw men made terrible arguments explicitly). Alternatively, if the author is intellectually honest (as here) the characters are allowed to give good points on each side.
I don't think the factual basis of holiday figures is as irrelevant as Beroe makes it out to be. I think the inspirational quality of the holiday can be indirectly affected by it.
Take Columbus Day. Say a kid gets inspired by the spirit of exploration and progress the mythical Columbus is supposed to embody, and wants to be just like him. Maybe she wants to find a scientific falsehood people in the modern day believe, and show everyone it's wrong, just like mythic Columbus did with the flat earth. Now how does she go about doing that?
Mythic Columbus knew the world was round, when everyone else thought it was flat. But how did he know? I don't think the stories say. He just knows somehow. And how did he know the earth was small enough that sailing around it was feasible, and his crew wouldn't die of thirst long before he crossed the ocean? Again, the myths don't concern themselves with that detail.
So mythic Columbus just knows, because he's a mythic explorer. You can't learn to be a mythic explorer, you just are one. Hearing stories about mythic Columbus can't teach you to be like him.
Now imagine if instead of Columbus day, we celebrated, say, Eratosthenes day, in recognition of his factually real accomplishment of figuring out the circumference of the earth. How can you be like Eratosthenes? Well, the stories, and the writings of the real Eratosthenes, are happy to tell you! You do it by inventing a really clever experiment involving shadows, and being sufficiently obsessed that you actually pay someone to walk from Alexandria to Syene and count how many steps it takes, so you can calculate the distance between them.
Historical figures who accomplished real, great things for humanity can teach you things. Because of their factuality, their achievements make sense, they are reducible to components. Their stories contain real evidence of what you need to do, how you need to think, how you ought to live your life, if you want to achieve great things yourself. To me, that just seems like a much more substantial and filling kind of inspiration than the kind you get from mythic explorers like Columbus.
>Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration.
Ok, I'll bite. No-one knows when Jesus was born. The clues in the gospels are sparse and contradictory. The Nativity wasn't widely celebrated as a festival until the fourth century.
Hippolytus of Rome put the date at 25 December in the early 3rd century. He writes (in the Commentary on Daniel), "For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years. He suffered in the thirty-third year, March 25th, Friday, the eighteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while Rufus and Roubellion were Consuls." It's probably not a coincidence that this places the Annunciation on 25th March, coinciding with the date given for Good Friday. At any rate, Hippolytus isn't fixing the date of a festival. If anything, he's concerned with fitting Christ's chronology to Daniel's prophecies.
Saturnalia fell on 17 December and continued until 23 December. The festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti did fall on 25 December, but this is itself a late invention, not attested earlier than 354, but plausibly instituted by Aurelian (who created the cult of Sol Invictus), who reigned 270-275. That of course postdates Hippolytus, so while it remains possible that the Church ultimately fixed 25 December as the date of the Nativity to compete with Aurelian's festival, it's equally possible that Aurelian chose the date in an attempt to suppress nascent Christian celebrations on that day.
Something that would be interesting to thing about / that I can’t grasp clearly right now is how holidays that start as political/religious events like Indigenous Colombus Day or Christmas or May Day eventually turn into Big Family Picnic/Dinner/Long Weekend Day and end up losing their intended significance, while still contributing to bringing us together. I mean, even Christmas, it used to be religiously minor, and the church was more interested in Easter, but it somehow caught on in the population, was gradually stripped of its religiously significant stuff* and now is hardly a religious holiday at all. And yet it’s the stereotypical example of what we like in holidays, that they bring us together, are traditions, etc.
I guess it may have to do with the actual underlying beliefs: May Day where I’m from used to be huge among workers, because they had a strongly shared working-class culture, but is now only a long weekend for anyone other than very committed trade unionists and left-wing student activists. However, even when it was really big, it never really seems to have caught on among non-working class people. That’s kind of a problem if you want your holidays to help your nation-building, because having holidays built upon specific examples of people, behaviours, what-have-yous, is good for that, but harder than to agree on than a Day of Generally Not Being Too Much of an Asshole, or a Day of That Specific Foodstuff that The Whole Country Thinks Tastes Great, or something.
* Before the 1950s in France, Christmas still had important religious elements including the fact that the presents were mostly brought to children by the Little Jesus, who in the 1950s was gradually replaced by Father Christmas/Santa Claus, leading to the following wonderful anecdote:
In 1951 in Dijon, clerics burned at the stake a straw effigy of Santa in protest against the de-christianization of Christmas. Just so you know it happened and can have fun imagining what it looked like.
I could (could have?) cared less about Columbus Day until Mariano A. Lucca started pushing for a greater recognition of it as a holiday and the whole Italian American “thing” blew up with the popularity of “The Godfather” stirring the gravy. Still could care less. But this post is both fun to read and enlightening.
> suppose we were to replace Christmas with another holiday that tested equally well in focus groups. It had just as much potential for holiday specials, provided just as much of an excuse to get together with family, even had delightful mythological characters who, starting ex nihilo, would have just as much appeal as Santa. Would you feel like something had been lost?
I have had weird feelings reading this. I am from Russia, and this precisely what has happened here (without focus groups though). In soviet era, Christmas was banned as too religious, and replaced with New Year celebrations (in the night from 31st of December to the 1st of January), which are as massive a holiday as Christmas is in the US. For New Year, families come together, decorate a spruce tree (which is called a New Year Tree rather than a Christmas Tree), and give each other presents which are supposedly distributed by Grandfather Frost, who is totally not Santa Claus despite being an old jolly bearded guy giving the presents. (He has evolved from the East Slavic mythology rather Cristianity, so while he was briefly banned, the soviet government was much less strict about that, as, in accordance with the post, they feared Pagan opposition much less than Christian opposition). And Christmas in Russia is mostly celebrated by people who are indeed religious.
And yes, in Russia we are kind of without tradition with regard to national holidays, because all the main ones are at most soviet-era old. The most popular are The New Year, The International Women's Day and the Day of Protectors of the Fatherland (Progressives in Russia have been to change the nature of both of them for years: to make the Women's Day more about feminism and awareness of Women's rights, rather than flowers, beauty and "We wish you to smile more and to be a decoration of your work team"; and to demilitarise the discourse around the Protector's day and just turn it into Man's Day, like it works in school, where girls give boys gifts for Protector's Day, and boys give girls gift for Women's Day), and the Labour Day and Victory Day (the has also been attempted to get demilitarised for years, to be turned from belligerent weapons demonstrations into a day of grief for those who have died in WWII, of whom there are a few in practically every Russian family history). So yeah, we live in a country with a short tradition of holidays, and there are lots of clashes around them.
Also, I have just read on Wikipedia that in Ukraine there is a movement to change the focus from New Year to Christmas again, because New Year is associated with the Soviet past. I don't have any personal evidence on whether this is true, however.
Coria's proposal seems like it comes from a super weird place in terms of the understanding of culture it implies.
For as much as holidays are secularized in modern societies, and particularly in American culture(s), one thing I got in part from your recent-ish post on Pride and 4th of July celebrations, is that, if you look closely and don't let yourself be blinded by your preconceptions of what you *should* be seeing, it's plain as day that the animating spirits are usually the same old deities that humans have been throwing parties for for millennia, plus some younger gods that emerged out of the Enligtenment.
Here it's the myth of the frontier, of the brave explorer setting out for the unknown, which casts its shadow in the shape of a colonizer, a transgressor of boundaries who re-casts the world he discovers in his own image VS the myth of multiplicity and difference, of the beauty and inherent worth of the world in all of its particularities, which casts its shadow in the dissolution of the individual, which exists as individual insofar as it posits itself against that multiplicity.
When I think about the discourse around national holidays in terms of these symbolic undercurrents, even the apparently silly arguments often don't seem as trivial anymore. We have a kind of unresolved mythological contradiction in our culture, and people don't agree on what the pantheon should look like in some pretty crucial places.
Coria's apparently rational solution of just celebrating random people who happen to be well-loved by the average modern American also can't help you here, since the process by which you decide what to celebrate is what tells you what you really celebrate.
If you come up with a totally rational system for what your national holidays should be, and rationality is the sole determining factor, then all of your national holidays will ultimately be a celebration of rationality, and people who worship other gods in their hearts (freedom, justice, forgiveness, tradition, progress, etc.) aren't going to feel represented by that.
They'll know with every festival they attend that in your nation there is only one true god, and any other virtues are only valid insofar as they are justified through him.
Not that the god of truth doesn't have a strong claim to the title of one true god, but if you trick people into worshipping him, you're really just tricking them into worshipping the god of tricking people into worshipping things if it serves the greater good.
I'm pretty sure the Indigenous People’s Day side would hate the mythological Columbus as well, since he still represents the Great Man conception of history. Asking them to imagine a good colonist is like asking leftists to imagine a good billionaire - the archetype is hopelessly corrupted. Even in a sanitized version of the myth where natives do not exist, Columbus' journey still led to widespread ecological damage to the Americas.
(Amusingly, I've recently become aware of the I-don't-know-how-serious idea of Genghis Khan being an ecological hero, since his decimation of world population caused a noticeable reduction in carbon emissions. So maybe being pro-Human is overrated nowadays.)
Yeah, Italian-Americans tend to care about the holiday. Even if we didn't pick Columbus - note a WASP picked him for us. But by golly we'll take what we were given. And once something is given, the receiver generally doesn't want a gift taken back. (Do NOT insert culturally insensitive and unjust stereotyping slur here.)
(I will note that my mom would also sometimes let us skip school on 3/19, St. Joseph's day in celebration of being an Italian American. It probably is worth noting that the county of my childhood is named after St. Joe and since there was already a local tradition of celebrating Polish Americans (Dyngus Day) where we'd also get day off, a special day seemed appropriate.) Dyngus Day is also now combined with Solidarity Day, a parallel celebration of local black Americans. And of course there were always St. Patrick's day events given the Irish at the local French school.
But I personally have no problem with the red paint thrown on Columbus statutes. I prefer to imagine it is ragu rather than blood. That kind of baptism would be a great permanent addition to the Holiday to symbolically remind us of both pasta sauce and genocide.
We need symbols of benign granfallons, if only as a slapstick program to be "lonesome no more".
Lacking such benign symbols as salve for alienation, it is easy to turn to putting on red MAGA hats or joining a gang or adopting KKK identities or storming the Capitol.
I'm not an American but from what people say, aside from some Italian-Americans nobody cares that much about Columbus Day for the sake of Columbus (correct me if I'm wrong). In that sense if it suddenly disappeared and was magically replaced with another holiday nothing much would be missing - people would still get their day off. The problem is that trying to replace it with an anti-holiday (as you say) comes across as "the status of your ingroup should be lowered, and ours raised". So it's not so much a matter of losing Columbus himself as not wanting to seen to lose a symbolic cultural battle.
I feel like Leif Erikson Day is an under appreciated compromise. First and most importantly, his expedition is the one that first closed the circle of human exploration into a loop around the entire world. Second, while he wasn't a saint he wasn't a monster either. Misunderstandings created conflicts with the native Americans but all things being equal he preferred to peacefully trade with them.
The question of "which holidays?" is of course, at base a question of power.
From this, Indigenous People's Day (and Colombus Day a century and a half earlier) are exercises in virtue signaling, but the reason that these gestures signal(ed) virtue in the first place is because they conform(ed) to the class ideology of the hegemonic classes at the time.
In other words, the hegemonic class (the Professional Managerial Class In 2022 and the Propertied Gentry in 1890) gets to decide what is normative, what goes without saying. For that matter, this is why celebrating Colombus Day is today seen as a bit retrograde. You need to get with the program.
A couple centuries ago, almost nobody would have questioned that some were born to rule and others to serve.
>You changed “society is preventing pogroms against a marginalized group” to “left-wingers are cynically milking people for their votes”, so yes, I would say it is substantially different.
At this point, my pre-conception makes A's argument kinda baffling. How many pogroms, since 1977 (the creation of IPD, apparently) did american natives suffer? This seems to be straight up "making up a problem to which agreeing with me is the solution".
>the Mongols are celebrating him for fine, pro-human reasons like bravery and tactical brilliance - so we let it pass.
I'm ready to bet the Mongols are celebrating him for being a great conqueror, which is a similar reason for why I'd celebrate Colombus if I were a white american: because he was a great explorer who granted my peoples an entire continent to strive in. If he had, in fact, found a powerful Cipangu or Cathay already holding the land he discovered, his fame would have been a blip, a name you learn in class & remember for trivial pursuit nights, but not "two state capitals, a big river, 3 spacecrafts and a godess".
Overall, really, B is unconvincing, but A is ludicrous. I'd almost suspect Scott wrote them to make C's insanity more appealing.
"Mass mediated culture died with the first TCP connection. Arguments over what 'we' should do end up elucidating that there may be no such thing as 'we', and to the extent that it exists, it is certainly no longer programmable as it once was."
Celebrating (or more accurately, "observing" because no one is having a heap big party, except for the Canadians) Indigenous People's Day is not quite about having an anti-holiday to neutralize Columbus Day. It's not a perfect particle-antiparticle reaction that gives off useful energy. It's a humiliation ritual. When you have vanquished your foe, you must smash his idols and desecrate his holy places. It's a practice as old as civilization. Columbus is an idol of the oppressive system that has been defeated. Some holdouts may not accept that they have been defeated, but the grinding of Columbus idols into dust will show them.
A, B, and C seem to accept as a given that Columbus was a horrible, vicious person. This may be the case, but nearly all of the horrible things he supposedly did were reported by a single source, a Spaniard named Francisco de Bobadilla who was sent (in 1499) to evaluate how things were going. Most of his negative information was supplied by enemies of Columbus. Needless to say, there is a great deal of back and forth controversy about the truth of Bobadilla's assertions.
Columbus was probably no worse than your average adventurer in terms of evil. What he is celebrated for is opening the "new world" to the "old world," and vice versa. He found it and publicized it. It was one of the most consequential events in the last thousand years. That puts him way ahead of anyone else in the explorer league. If his voyage and exploration had ended like Leif Ericsson's, we would not celebrate him.
By the way, in Columbus' time, no one believed the Earth was flat. The issue that made it hard for Columbus to get support was that essentially all learned people believed the Earth's circumference was around 24,000 miles, following Eratosthenes. Columbus believed it was much smaller (or at least pretended to believe that) and therefore provides a shorter voyage the to "Indies."
Why is Einstein on the list of notable americans? He lived in the US for only the last 22 years of this life, long after the creative period of his career which happened in Switzerland and Germany.
The older I get, the more acceptable I think it is to judge people's morals based on the time they lived in. Columbus was cutting hands in a historical period when everybody with power was cutting hands, including our very ancestors.
European's first reaction to "Indigenous People's Day": that's a real dick move guys. Not to Columbus, but to indigenous people.
Native Americans should 100% get a day. But putting that day on the anniversary of when white people showed up and started wiping them out seems really... white-centric (I live in the right-wing universe, so I don't know the lingo - I assume there's a word for this). You'll be celebrated on the day we discovered you! It's also kind of insensitive, along the lines of celebrating Japan day on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. It's also a bit random to celebrate US Native Americans on the day that Columbus discovered an entirely different part of North America.
Galaxy brain take: if I were Cherokee or whatever, I think I'd be more offended by this than Columbus day.
The main thing is that Native Americans are a pretty invisible group who are, because of history, generally living in bad situations. (Drive through some of the Nations out West if you want to be depressed.) What can we do to maybe improve that situation?
China has Single's Day and Japan celebrates "White Day" that is all about giving white-colored gifts. Japan also celebrates Christmas with eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and without the slightest care about the thing that Save Our Christmas people think is Christmas.
It's mildly surprising that Columbus Day hasn't yet been appropriated with Columbus representing modern American entrepreneurship: Silicon Valley billionaires who promised something they couldn't deliver but nonetheless were able to obtain massive amounts of venture capital.
The demotion of Columbus Day is analogous to the demotion of Confederate Civil War monuments, in that both represent cultural heroes to one group of Americans and genocide to another group of Americans.
I'd never imagined Indigenous Peoples Day as celebrating IP outside the United States, but substitute Comanche for Aztec and the blog argument still works.
Adraste's point about the movement of Easter and Christmas are so historically inaccurate it is infuriating. Tim O'Neill has written pages on why this is complete nonsense from a historical perspective. A lot of the post-hoc rationalizations about why Christians would or would not have been motived to do this ignore mountains of historical data that it was not a cynical ploy to replace one cultural celebration with another.
Please stop recycling these tropes about Christian holidays.
"Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre."
These two are related, so I'm going to deal with them together. To the first, "kind of", to the second, "not just nope but heck nope!"
The Tangled Question of Easter:
Saying that Easter "neutralised the rites of the spring goddess Eostre" needs to be unpacked. The milder reading is "everyone was having such a blast celebrating Easter that they forgot about Eostre". The stronger reading is "Easter was invented to replace Eostre's cult" (this can be a Pagan and Wiccan claim, though not solely and not completely). You know who I'm going to quote on this one:
So! First of all, we have to figure out "Was there even a goddess Eostre?" and the evidence for that is pretty thin. Ironically in this context, the reason English-speaking world talks about "Easter comes from Eostre" is due to a work by the Christian monk the Venerable Bede (now Saint Bede, having finally been canonised in 1899, 1,164 years after his death in 735. He's been called "the Venerable" for so long that that is how he is still generally referred to). Bede was a skilled linguist and translator, and one of his important works was De temporum ratione/The Reckoning of Time:
This is important, because it tackles the question of how to compute the date of Easter, which was A Very Big Important Problem for the church calendar. I'll get back to this when considering the first part, about when was Jesus born, but let's stick with Easter for the minute. As well as showing off his scholarship and learning about Greek, Roman, Hebrew and other measures of time, "He gives some information about the months of the Anglo-Saxon calendar."
Buckle up, kids, this is where we take off. When Bede was talking briefly about the Anglo-Saxon calendar, he mentioned Eostre or rather the month name derived from her:
"The Old English deity Ēostre is attested solely by Bede in his 8th-century work The Reckoning of Time, where Bede states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent of April), pagan Anglo-Saxons had held feasts in Ēostre's honour, but that this tradition had died out by his time, replaced by the Christian Paschal month, a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus."
And that is it. That is the *only* place anyone talks about or mentions Eostre (that we have records of). So where did we get Bryan Singer's [American Gods](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv83-BzdOEE) "hey, Jesus stole your month, girl"? Invented out of whole cloth, more or less. The 18th-19th century craze for going back to Ze Ancient Authentic Native Folk Traditions involved a lot of folk etymology, even by the scholars of the day, and they went a bit wild with Eostre.
Do we even know for sure that she is associated with spring? Not definitely, it's an assumption because her month was in the Northern European spring season. Rabbits (should be hares, as in 'mad as a March hare' because hares mate in spring), eggs and the like are all spring related, but we don't even know that decorating eggs for Easter *is* an Eostre tradition, rather than a Christian one; the same way eggs, milk, butter and sugar are used up on Pancake Tuesday/Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras, before Lent begins, then decorating eggs which could once again be eaten freely in Spring once Easter came is likely to be as much Christian as anything else.
Side note: out of curiosity, I looked up when the first chocolate Easter eggs were introduced:
"Chocolate eggs first appeared at the court of Louis XIV in Versailles and in 1725 the widow Giambone in Turin started producing chocolate eggs by filling empty chicken egg shells with molten chocolate. In 1873 J.S. Fry & Sons of England introduced the first chocolate Easter egg in Britain. Manufacturing their first Easter egg in 1875, Cadbury created the modern chocolate Easter egg after developing a pure cocoa butter that could be moulded into smooth shapes."
So, chocolate Easter eggs is a late 19th century creation, like many of our current traditions.
So "Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre" is like saying "We celebrate the Fourth of July, with its anti-monarchical emphases, to neutralise the honours paid to Julius Caesar". You could more easily say that "Passover neutralises the rites of the spring goddess" because of the connections with the Vernal Equinox and the Christian feast of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. I don't think anybody is going to argue (but who knows? I have not plumbed the depths of all the Internet) that "The Jews totally invented Passover just to take over the established celebration for Eostre".
Which brings us back to the Easter dating controversy, part of which was that some places in the early Church celebrated it at the same time as Passover was being celebrated, and there were others who wanted to make it very distinct that "We're not Jewish and this is not a Jewish feast". Another large part was calendar drift, hence the various works on "this is how you work out what day it falls on" since Easter is a moveable feast, which returns us neatly to St. Bede and the Anglo-Saxons 😀
Now, taking the first part, second, when was Jesus born? The short answer is, we don't know, we can't even say He was born in the spring since nobody had an exact time or date. What happened was that Easter was always the most important feast of the church calendar, and the celebration of the birth was a much more minor event (partly because of the theology, partly because we had a definite date for Easter). Theories of the time held that important and celebrated individuals had symbolic and important dates in their lives, and that the date of death of such a person was related to the date of their birth.
This would mean that you would be celebrating both Christ's birth and death on the same dates, which would be confusing - it does happen sometimes, that March 25th (Lady Day) which has been set as the date of the Annunciation is also the date of Good Friday (Easter being a moveable feast) so both are celebrated, or commemorated, at the same time, as in Donne's poem when the same thing happened in 1608:
And to quote his description of Mary, mother of Christ:
"She sees at once the Virgin Mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha ;
Sad and rejoiced she's seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen ;
At once a son is promised her, and gone ;
Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John ;
Not fully a mother, she's in orbity ;
At once receiver and the legacy."
Confusing, yes? So the Easter date of the definite death of Christ was maintained, and the spring date was given to celebrate His conception (not birth). Move on nine months from conception to birth, which brings us neatly to December and the proper distance between the two.
That the Winter Solstice is in this period probably is important, but was it picked to "neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration"? As I said, yes and no; the Easter distinction was more important, but that people were familiar with a winter festival probably didn't hurt either (I don't lean too heavily on the Sol Invictus thing since that's really about winter festivals in general, not direct "the Church took this particular feast over").
I’m not sure the other examples of “Anti-Holiday” given are really “anti” the same way Indigenous Peoples Day is. Moving Easter and Christmas to sit on top of existing pagan holidays was more like “we’re a proselytizing religion trying to make converts in a place where the people demand a big winter solstice and spring equinox party, so let’s bolt some Christian mythology onto the existing pagan traditions, that way everybody gets to have the same party but we can say the prayers are going to Jesus now. Win-win!” Hanukkah, kind of the same thing - the people demand a big end of year holiday, so let’s bolt on the nearest Jewish holiday and make that one a big deal.
The “invented from whole cloth to make people feel guilty” nature of IPD is I think unique. If you wanted an analogue to the other “anti-holidays”, IPD would need to co-opt existing Columbus Day traditions so the people celebrating CD aren’t put out. But a) no one really celebrates CD anymore outside of a few Italian-American communities, and b) the IPD equivalent would be a big parade and feast that the same people promoting IPD would find to be offensive cultural appropriation.
“Sacagawea Day” is actually a good idea, in that a day to celebrate Indian and European cooperation and exploration would be a much better way to co-opt CD. Everyone can have a big party and not feel guilty. Then again our national religion already has an Indian European cooperation myth, and we use it for Thanksgiving.
So really the right thing to do would to just be to let Columbus Day die off, but we can’t do that because government workers will be pissed about having a contractual day of paid leave in October removed.
I'm always amused at the take on Christian history that are casually thrown out for glib, um, galaxy-brained bon mots. In this case, pretending that St. Nicholas just sorta up and attacked some poor rando at Nicaea. But it does make for good copy amongst the non-religious crowd I suppose.
I'm high up on the anti-woke scale, but OK with Columbus being cancelled...this dialogue did a nice job of fleshing out why. The enslaving and genociding is inextricable from his success. On the other hand, "Indigenous People's Day" is a little cringey for reasons also delineated, but what can you do? Everyone needed their mid-October holiday I guess? But could we have pushed it back to Nov. 1 as a recovery day from Halloween?
Do we need federal holidays at all? It seems like their main significance in closing governmental offices that are supposed to be serving the public. If you want federal employees to have days off, just give them vacation days that they can take without shutting down services that the public can need.
[I realize employers may not take kindly to too many employees taking voluntary vacation days simultaneously, but that seems like a minor employment policy issue, whose solution need not be official federal holidays.]
And would there be any loss to "culture" from not having Columbus day be federally recognized? Or any holiday for that matter? Columbus's enduring cultural resonance is probably a function of kids learning about him in history - not the federal holiday.
Similarly, it seems unlikely that Christmas would lose its cultural significance were it not an official federal holiday, but rather merely a day on which many if not most employees chose to spend with family, doing Christmasy things.
Speaking of Christmas, it seems odd to omit discussion of the centuries of horror unleashed by Christians and Christianity in a discussion about a holiday celebrating the birth of Christianity. It seems like an even stronger example of point about Columbus - that the perception of figures, events, or movements, can differ radically from group to group, and from dry history to living cultural endurance.
Instead of celebrating flawed individual people, we should reserve holidays for uncontroversial advancements, like Indoor Plumbing Day or Pre-Sliced Bread Day. Problem solved.
BTW, Columbus' whole voyage was premised on his belief that everyone else had overcalculated the circumference of the globe and therefore Asia was really only a few thousand miles off the coast of Europe. So he was a contrarian who got everything wrong but still succeeded. Better lucky than smart is the lesson, I guess.
"Allow me to try a hostile rephrasing of your point. There is no such thing as genuine heroism worth celebrating, or traditions worth keeping - only raw power. "
I love this. And this article in general. So many brilliant arguments presented in a fun way.
I don't think replacing "Columbus Day" with "Indigenous People’s Day" is very politically savvy, if the goal is anything but "maximizing controversy". From the other comments, I read that Columbus Day is for the Italian Americans what St. Patrick's Day is for the Irish American.
If it turned out that St. Patrick was Problematic (because he was anti snakes or whatever), then just gradually renaming it for some other famous Irish person or thing would be the way to go. Replacing it with Orange Snake Day will probably not be very successful.
Then again, the assumption that the goal of the people in favor of renaming might mostly be to minimize offending minorities might be overly charitable. Optimizing for controversy fits well with my model of how the culture war works. "Who cares if some privileged white minority uses this day to celebrate their heritage rather than colonialism. Causing a big stink will raise so much more awareness."
I think there is a relevant Simpsons episode about the founder of Springfield and if he should be celebrated even though he was a pirate in reality or something.
This doesn't even get into the question of what exactly an "indigenous" person is. Is a Quechua person in Maine, thousands of miles and a continent away from his homeland, an "indigenous" person?
Despite this being a pretty fantastic dialogue, I can't help but think you started from the pun of "Columbian exchange" and worked backward from there.
Question for UK or Commonwealth readers: What's the discourse around Guy Fawkes Day like these days?
I feel like it's an interesting counterpoint to this discussion. Columbus Day was created expressly as a means of promoting acceptance of a Catholic population in a heavily Protestant society. It existed as a blandly uncontroversial, largely unnoticed holiday for 90 years or so before turning into a culture war flash point, especially in recent years.
Guy Fawkes Day was created to celebrate England's identity as a Protestant state and show hostility to Catholicism. It spread to the colonies and was centuries a vehicle for anti-Catholic sentiment. Then at some point -- maybe after the Troubles? -- it settled down into what people apparently decided was just a fun innocuous affair with fireworks or something.
Is there some sort of model there for how a holiday can be declawed of its past divisiveness without needing to be completely rebranded or detached from all historical meaning? Or do people still fight over Guy Fawkes and I just don't hear about it here in the USA?
"I’ll just be standing over here in the corner in case you decide you like truth and goodness."
I think Adraste and Beroe could agree to celebrate "Let's Beat The Stuffing Out Of Coria Day".
As for suggested historical figures, next year Coria will be tut-tutting some of the selected, just like Adraste with Columbus Day, so here goes with my best "but why do you hate truth and goodness?" dying duck impersonation:
"There are plenty of lists of the greatest historical figures. Taking this one, selecting for only Americans or America-related people, and removing people too similar to each other, we get Columbus, Einstein, Edison, Washington, MLK, Disney, Franklin, Jonas Salk, Margaret Sanger, Susan B Anthony, and Louis Armstrong. We could combine it with this list of people who saved the most lives, of which the Americans are Maurice Hilleman, Henrietta Lacks, Jonas Salk, and Norman Borlaug - I think a good consensus list for both influential and moral might replace one of Columbus, Sanger or Franklin with Borlaug, and keep the rest."
Columbus is already on the no-no list. As for the rest -
Einstein. No-no, or have you already forgotten his sexism, misogyny, and stealing the work of his wife?
Edison - tsk-tsk. Relentless self-publicist, mired in controversies over who actually first invented the inventions he claimed, took the credit for discoveries made by employees, and involved with inventing the electric chair. Do you really want to honour someone who ghoulishly profited off the death penalty, bearing in mind the carceral state that disproportionately punishes minorities?
Washington - George or Carver? If the first, no-no again. Enslaver who, while not quite as bad as Thomas Jefferson, was still bad. Read this reparative creative work by a Nebula award winner and get educated:
Franklin - as in Ben? As in the Founding Fathers? Who were all racists, remember, who founded the Electoral College so slave-holding states could be represented, and this is why we never had the First Female President who would have brought about the Green Economy utopia :
I think both Adraste and Beroe are assuming that "culture" is some unchanging thing, and that modifying traditions/holidays/etc is inherently negative. America's treatment of Native Americans (including both demonization and idolization) has been a significant part of its culture since its founding, and I think this holiday changing merely reflects our culture's changing attitudes. As such, the change preserves culture, rather than undermining it.
I'm not sure if it's true that Columbus Day was invented as a sop to Italian-Americans or not, but it has become a more general celebration of the European discovery and settlement of the Americas. This (rather than Columbus' own personal failings) is why "they" want to take it away, and it's why White Americans take attacks on Columbus Day as attacks on themselves.
Shifting the celebration to Mayflower Day gives us a day that we can celebrate the European settlement of the Americas while avoiding controversy around the less nice aspects of Colombo himself. It also has the advantage of being directly relevant to the USA rather than to some nearby islands. One slight problem is that the Mayflower landed on 11-11 which is already a holiday, but shifting it to the day the Mayflower left England (September 6) seems like a good compromise that gives a much-needed late summer holiday.
Perhaps, I didn't look over the comments diligently enough, but when discussing made up holidays, no one cited Frank Costanza's "Festivus" (for the rest of us)?
[quote]Adraste: And you’re not being idealistic with your argument that we should never celebrate any holiday for anyone who has ever been associated with bad things? Except for Columbus, an exception you still haven’t even slightly explained?[/quote]
It leaves Beroe in a weird spot. Adraste says he can't celebrate Columbus day, that they are in conflict because he does. The usual reason for that is that Adraste-types say we can't have a holiday for any historic figure who ever did a bad thing. He points out an inconsistency between that statement and what the other person wants him to do, which is that the holiday the other person is trying to replace this guy's with is for flawed people as well.
Scott lets Adraste look at that and go "Now you are the person demanding we cancel holidays and replace them unless people sinless. And the burden of proof is on you, not me, the person who made the demand".
If Beroe has to defend both his position and Adrastes, he's in trouble - how could he possibly win? A good example of the implications are within the article; he doesn't NEED the Chrisanta Clausllumbus argument at the point he uses it; at the point the ball is still in Adraste's court to prove he isn't just stoking racial conflict using an inconsistantly applied principle.
"Labor Day was invented to screw up Communists’ attempts to coordinate around May Day as a labor protest holiday."
This is an interesting one, because the Communists themselves were appropriating a traditional holiday. May Day has been celebrated all over Europe forever:
Though this article claims it was picked by the American labour movement because of a strike that took place on 1st May:
"(T)he date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen's Association. They adopted a resolution for a "great international demonstration" in support of working-class demands for the eight-hour day. The date had been chosen by the American Federation of Labor to continue an earlier campaign for the eight-hour day in the United States, which had been the cause of a general strike beginning on 1 May 1886, and culminated in the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago four days later."
In 1955, the Church dedicated the 1st May to St. Joseph the Worker as a counterbalance to the socialist/communist/labour holiday. So everybody has been getting in on the game of "who can take May Day for their own?"
A line of argument that Beroe hints at but never directly articulates is that the very concept of “Indigenous People” is extremely Eurocentric, something you would expect Adraste to be sensitive to.
For one thing, the people in question aren’t necessarily “indigenous” (or especially “First People”). What they actually are are just the people who happened to be here when the European colonists started arriving. There are actually thousands of years of many evolving and warring cultures that rose and fell since the “first people” actually arrived.
The “indigenous” that the Europeans encountered were not in every case particularly old cultures. “Oxford is older than the Aztecs” for example, and of course our primary conception of the Plains Indians involves them chasing bison on horses, which of course are an animal that didn’t exist in North America until the Spaniards brought them. Not America, but the “indigenous” Māori of New Zealand only got there 400 years before Cook did.
Now, the Australian Aboriginals, THOSE dudes are Indigenous.
For another thing lumping them all into “Indigenous People” is a remarkably arrogant act of cultural flattening for diverse peoples that differed greatly in their cultures and lifestyles and quite often didn’t particularly care for the other groups of Indigenous People around them.
> Hanukkah was originally a minor celebration of a third-tier Bible story; American Jews bumped it up several notches of importance in order to neutralize Christmas.
This is incorrect: The Hanukkah story is post-biblical. Regarding how it got elevated in the US, I'm not sure the explanation given is correct either. :/
I would like to point out to Coria that the *last* person who tried rationalizing holidays to replace all those dumb superstitious ones ended up with his head chopped off on the day he had dedicated to the contemplation of lettuce.
Like d'Eglantine's rationalized holidays, proposing secular vacation days to celebrate the in vogue morals of the days often ends up as embarrassing, cold-oatmeal kitsch, of which both Columbus Day and Indigenous People's day are good example. (Oats by the way, should be contemplated on the 2nd of Messidor.)
I will give Corria credit for at least trying to substitute secular saints for religious ones, but I'm not sure you can ultimately separate "holiday" from a community centered around celebration of a "holy day" (and I wish Federal and State governments would stop trying to impose them from above).
To me, it seems like "Indigenous Peoples' Day" as a US holiday ought to be focused specifically on the indigenous people who live (or lived) within the area that is now the US, and the ways in which their knowledge and customs influenced the development of modern American culture. So any objection concerning indigenous people living elsewhere (Aztecs, Incas) doesn't strike me as particularly relevant.
I think it's also worth pointing out that we do have a longstanding holiday in November that already celebrates that specific thing (the contributions of specific indigenous people to early settlers in the US and their influence on development of modern American culture). But, strangely enough, that holiday isn't a particularly popular one nowadays...
I think it's generally anti-republican (little r) to have holidays celebrating specific people in general. President's Day or Independence Day or Labor Day or whatever are a better model for civic holidays. They celebrate events or traits or broad groups but not specific people. And it has the added advantage that there is neither a mythical or real person at the center so you are reduced to fighting over the general principle. Yes, there's a fight over Independence Day but it's a fight over whether the country itself is good. Which is a more interesting and relevant fight than whether Christopher Columbus specifically was X or Y. (Which ends up being a stand in for something modern anyway.)
Speaking of, when are the Rationalists going to get together and make a holiday?
We could rename Columbus Day as Colonial Day, and use it to estimate the amount of wealth extracted from colonized nations by all the colonizing empires. But then we should do a second calculation of the amount of wealth that might have been extracted by the 'exploited' nations, if they had had the technology and will to monetize their wealth themselves.
It could be argued that the United States colonized New Spain's northern frontier and exploited its minerals, but they had to counter raiding, financial failures, etc. Do the Americans colonizers apologize to Mexico and New Spain's colonizers, who apologize to the Apache, who ran off the Tohono O'odham, who inherited the land and its resources through several cultures that came before, stretching back maybe 14,000 years?
We might use the day to discuss the colonialism of Amazon and Facebook, MacDonald's and Disney.
"Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration."
Incorrect, we have several extant letters from early Church authors debating about when exactly Christ's birthday is. There is an ancient Jewish tradition that prophets died on the same day they were conceived. So, as Jesus died on March 25th, he was assumed to have been born nine months later, December 25th.
"Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre." Only in Germanic countries, in the rest of the world it's still called the Paschal Mass or Pascha. So while this might be true, it doesn't follow that "All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites." The Paschal Mass was celebrated centuries before the Christianisation of Germany.
This post showed me some holes in my map of US culture outside the little CA slice I was raised in.
The idea that anyone cared much about Columbus day (aside from culture war objections to Indigenous Peoples day) is pretty new to me, I'm going to look further into the history of it later. I didn't even associate him strongly with Italy....
The framing of Indigenous Peoples as a holiday celebrating those cultures seems a little off. In my experience (19 y/o going to public but extra blue tribed schools) it was always more of a solemn remembering-a-genocide situation. Plus, as a kid even in elementary on Columbus day (it hadn't been renamed yet) we just learned a little about how colonialism sucked. Whatever it's called, to me it's always been a day where we get talked to about colonialism sucking, then we get a three-day weekend. I don't think it matters much what it's called, federally. My college is giving me IP's day off, my HS always listed it as IP's day, to the point I was mildly surprised to learn that the government listed it as Columbus day.
I propose: "National history is complicated day" Where we can have discussions like this one and more and instill in our children the vital concept that the past is a foreign country! It could have fun rituals like everyone taking turns lionizing some historical figure and then someone else can read off a script why that figure was a moral monster in favor of some other figure and the next person in line can then read off a script tearing down that figure and so on and so on.
Norman Borlaug day for the win! I think I’m going to start celebrating a few of these alternate holidays in my family. Imagine how much better our society would be if people associated actually excellent historical figures with cake and parties and spending time with family.
I celebrate the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and all the US veterans who faught in a war that ended with the nation nearly doubling its territorial footprint. And because of those men, I was born in that area as a free American.
This post made me happier than most ACT posts in recent memory. Thank you.
Object level: I never liked Columbus Day, and the a-historicity of Chicago's Elementary School encomia to Columbus gave me the creeps a decade before I read Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (which is a surprisingly deep and interesting story about the power of charismatic people to affect history in random directions).
Spoiler: this novel did not redeem Cristóbal Colón in my eyes, but it did get me thinking about the holiday in pretty similar ways to how Scott is discussing them, here.
I wrote a Petrov day ceremony booklet (http://petrovday.com/), and unironically support meritocratically allocating holidays to people who deserve it.
That said, I don't think Henrietta Lacks deserves a holiday. Not because cancer research isn't important. Nor because I think giving a cell culture is insufficiently virtuous. Rather, I think Henrietta Lacks should not be honored because I hold a grudge against HeLa, the microorganism that descends from her cancer. It is most famous not for its positive contributions to cancer research, but for invading and ruining cancer research on other cell lines. I don't think this kind of Petri-dish-invasion imperialism should be celebrated!
in related/unrelated news, in my state here kids had a day off last week for Yom Kippur. Jews are a small single digit % of the population here, smaller than several other communities. Other than political clout it bewilders me why that day should be made a holiday for everyone. Also what happens when every other community starts demanding the same for their holidays.
>Maybe if I believed that we could create an even better explorer holiday - one honoring Neil Armstrong, maybe - I could be convinced to part with Columbus Day
You know what? Let's do it. The rationalist community already has Stanislav Petrov Day and Smallpox Eradication Day, let's make July 20th Neil Armstrong Day. Who cares if it didn't affect us directly? You already made the case that the myth is more important than the facts. The moon landing is such a defining, myth-making moment of progress that people to this day say "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we...?" as a way to express their disappointment with human progress. It's the day we celebrate humanity's aspiration to always travel farther and faster, to explore the unknown. And we can celebrate it with a guy who really did set foot on untouched land, rather than a guy who planted flags on someone else's land and pretended it was untouched.
>I’m sorry, you may be right about the history, but Indigenous Peoples’ Day is just not a very good holiday. Indigenous Peoples are just too vague and diverse to have any real attachment to them.
Take a page from The Oatmeal and celebrate Bartolome de las Casas, a contemporary of Columbus who fought for the rights of the natives: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day
Think it should be fine for Whites to celebrate Columbus Day for their ancestors conquering this beautiful land and for Native Americans to observe Indigenous Day to lament their ancestors losing it. It used to happen in ancient times. The day some empire conquered some major city would be a feast day while the inhabitants of that city might observe it as day of mourning.
I honestly never knew about the New Orleans pogrom in 1892, and definitely would have never guessed that the largest lynching in American history was directed at Italians. I feel like that’s some important context that is completely ignored in the conversation around Columbus Day.
I encourage everyone to do the minimal amount of work necessary to prove this false:
"Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed by feeling vaguely guilty, making a big show of not celebrating Columbus Day, and making sure not to do anything fun or cultural related to Indigenous Peoples in any way, lest it offend someone."
Most populated areas have interesting cultural events for this holiday. Don't be a lazy bitch like Beroe, go do or see something cool.
I wonder whether Columbus Day is the only reason everyone learns about Columbus. The Americas we care about started in 1620. Columbus seems a lot like *South* American history, which is like a single unit in high school otherwise.
I think Beroe may be wrong about us being incapable of creating good holidays anymore. First, Pride celebrations seem pretty fun, genuine, and widespread despite being superficially similar to the example of Heritage Celebration Month. Secondly, Juneteenth isn’t entirely new but is new federally and at least is a pretty great, singular event to mythologize and celebrate. I don’t really know what to do for it yet, but it seems like the right foundation that’s not generic and is heroic. Lastly, we’re importing some of the greatest holidays from elsewhere like Holi that have awesome celebrations. So I’m quite optimistic that future holidays will be at least as awesome as Columbus Day and maybe something will come along that can topple the greatest American holiday, Halloween.
I think it’s a missed opportunity for us to have holidays dedicated to Fear and to Love but none to other emotions. What about a Social Awkwardness day? You could go to “haunted” houses that contain people trying to make small talk with you about sports you don’t follow. I imagine Guilt could be covered well by existing holidays, maybe combining Earth Day with Lent? Pride has been taken already, so sadly we won’t really get a holiday about self aggrandizement. Loneliness gets smuggled into Valentine’s Day or really any major holiday when you’re alone - but maybe we need to find a way to celebrate it for those that aren’t already lonely, just as Halloween creates fright in those not generally afraid. An Uncertainty day would probably be popular to the rationalist community. How about a Lost in an Unfamiliar Place day? Celebrate by going to a new city and turning off your GPS and asking strangers for directions. Actually that one sounds like a great idea with growing importance.
This was fun. Thanks. It's kinda sad that the celebration of Italian culture in America has Columbus attached to it. Dyngus day and St. Patrick's day are better in that regard. The great thing about Dyngus day and St. Paddy's (here in Buffalo NY) is that on those days everyone (who wants to be) is Polish or Irish and can join the party. All ethnic celebrations should be like that. (The 'cultural appropriation' stuff just seems silly to me.)
On a side note is there anyone saying that holding our heroes of the past to todays standards is also silly. I think it's a much better to use these 'apparent human failures' ( I sat for 5 minutes trying to find the right words here... no luck) as a window into the mindset/ culture of the past. (I do like the image of the mythical Columbus, thanks for that.) We are all sinners, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't love each other.
1. We should have 24 federal holidays: two per month. (Work is overrated.)
2. Presidents Day - why? Do we have a legislators day or judges day.
3. The Day of the Unknown Immigrant in lieu of Columbus Day.
4. The Day of the Unknown Native American in addition to 3.
5. MLK Day. Sigh, we should celebrate non-violent protest, we should celebrate civil rights, we should remember all victims of violence. But should we engage in secular hagiography?
6. Holidays are holy days. But what things are really "holy" in a secular state. What are the "symbols" that are important? What things are worth teaching via the symbol of a holiday.
Political
First Amendment Day
Executive Day
Legislative Day
Judicial Day
Constitution Day
Jury Day
Presumption of Innocence Day
Due Process Day
?
Sociological
Immigration, aboriginals, the abolition of slavery, pluralism, equality, solidarity, work, leisure, safety, the prevention of injury and death,?
Personal
Sacrifices of military, sacrifices of heroes, mothers, fathers, children, ?
If we're looking to replace Columbus Day with a celebration of someone associated with the European exploration and colonization of the Americas, then it might make sense to narrow it down slightly to *English/British* exploration and colonization, since that's more America-specific and it sidesteps the problem of Columbus being clearly the most significant foundational figure for overall European exploration.
The main names that leaps to mind off the top of my head are Walter Raleigh, John Cabot, Myles Standish, John Smith, and William Penn. Plus natives who had substantial roles in peaceful collaboration with early English colonists: Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Squanto. Off the bat, I'd eliminate Squanto and Standish since they're redundant with Thanksgiving, and then eliminate Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Smith since their story requires even more whitewashing and mythologizing than Thanksgiving.
Of the remaining people, Raleigh wins the established name recognition test by a large margin, while Penn is probably the most personally laudable of the three (Raleigh being a convicted pirate and war criminal, and Cabot being something of a blank slate due to paucity of contemporary accounts of his life and voyages). Cabot has the advantage of being a suitable hero-figure for Italian Americans in lieu of Columbus, as Cabot was an Italian mariner (probably born in either Naples or Genoa, and later became a naturalized Venetian citizen) who took service as an explorer for Henry VII.
Bravo! This was pretty interesting. A lot of unexpected arguments on both sides.
There were a few bits that annoyed me though, like when Beroe says "At least we got a real historical figure who we can have feelings about.", even though her position is that Columbus Day is not celebrating a real historical figure in the first place.
Incidentally, while reading this, I imagined two guys having the argument even though both characters were given female names. I wonder what that says about me.
Alternative "logical" way to decide what holidays to have: never mind what people did in the past, who do we *want* to celebrate now? You could have a big vote using something clever like Condorcet voting to try to avoid anything that too many people hate, and get a list that empirically reflects our current desires.
Of course, in Britain we'd end up with a Boaty McBoatface Day, but that's just what you have to live with.
1. I would think a graph of numbers of Nobel Prize winners in the physical sciences per country does count as observational evidence! Crude, to be sure, but then what wouldn't be.
2. There is (in my book) a real tendency that shows up in the revolutionary calendar, the decimalisation of everything (including the proportion of students to be admitted to École Polytechnique and École Normale - btw, see https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20757), Auguste Comte (who, incidentally, was Coria in the dialogue), etc., it is
(a) a tendency rooted in the Enlightenment,
(b) not nearly as dominant, ever, as you may make it out to be.
In particular, if you talk to anybody sufficiently familiar with the French research system, and mention Napoleon, you will hear about his creation of Grandes Écoles, not about any supposed allegiance of his to some sort of universal guiding principle.
3. Thanks for the link. Feynman starts out being funny (if a bit overly simplistic) and then shows unfamiliarity with how many mathematicians work. Of course mathematicians are guided by intuition, special cases, etc. If a difference is to be made, it is that they get to choose what those special cases are, rather than having them dictated by (previous understandings of) physical reality.
The part about holidays being created to counter other holidays is questionable. Putting Christmas on December 25th, for example, might have had more to do astronomically with the winter solstice, or it might have been drawn from the belief that Jesus was both crucified and conceived on March 25th. Another theory, which is somewhat ironic if I'm using the word right, is that the date of Christmas was originally taken directly from Hanukkah.
Andraste presents it as fact that Jesus was actually born in the spring, but I don't know if there's conclusive proof of that. I think the date is a matter of both theological and historical/archaeological controversy.
It's possible that he's correct (that is, that Jesus was born in the spring, and his birthday party was moved to December to screw over the Pagans) but I'd consider it to be one valid theory among many, or perhaps one contributing cause among several, rather than the sole proven cause.
(On the actual subject of the post, briefly: I think the concept of a holiday to remember defeated or forgotten peoples is cool. Aztecs and their victims, or for other continents, maybe ancient Carthage, the Greco-Bactrians, the Tocharians, and so on. I find the politics behind Indigenous Peoples Day tiresome, but I can see some genuine appeal in the concept.)
I apologise, but as a non-American this entire debate is so insanely weird. Inventing a culture (which is essentially what is going on here) by committee, Socratic dialogue, or by using analytics or focus groups is farcical.
FWIW, there doesn't need to be a link between what is a "government mandated extra day off" and a cultural event. In the UK, the later 20th century saw a reorganisation of the "bank holidays" to fall more evenly. That's why we have "late May bank holiday" and "August Bank Holiday" which have no symbolism attached to them. I don't see why Columbus Day couldn't just be designated October Public Holiday and you can do what you like on the day...
I think the explanation is that "it was believed in ancient times" (I've never found evidence of this) (I also haven't looked for evidence) that great men died on the date of their conception. To be born in late December, Jesus would've been conceived in late March.
If I hypothetically construe the word "millionaire" as referring to any representative of the set of all glasses-wearing persons, would it be a sensible statement to say that I am a millionaire?
To answer the complaining question "What should people even do on indigenous people day", it seems as obvious as it seems fated that it will not be widely done: actually visit a local indigenous people cultural center of some kind, or otherwise spend time learning about your local indigenous people, their history, and their current biggest problems.
When Czechoslovakia was created after WW1, the left held the position that religion and the church was a relic of Austria-Hungary. So a group of members of parliament proposed a law to cancel all religious holidays and enact new "national" holidays (May 1, July 6, October 28, the greatly reduced number of holidays should have been compensated by a paid vacation of one week/year). Unsurprisingly, the proposal did not succeed.
I feel like the third character really should've been Cadmus, given that Adraste and Beroe both appear in the story of Sémélé.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9m%C3%A9l%C3%A9
So it's less that this is a bad process per se, and more that we've gotten worse at making holidays?
I feel like Adraste missed two obvious counterpoints at the end there.
First, does anyone actually have the same level of sentiment about Columbus Day as they do about Christmas? As Beroe himself pointed out, it's an artificial holiday that was invented relatively recently. Not only is there a positive side effect of replacing it, but the negatives are almost certainly much lower.
Second, Columbus Day is a *federal* holiday. I think there's actually quite a good argument for replacing the federal holiday of Christmas with a secular alternative, since the government really shouldn't be endorsing a particular religion. Christians would still have their day off to celebrate Christmas the same as always and non-Christians can at least nominally be included by Winter Day or whatever. It's not like Christmas would be abolished, the government would just be taking a slightly more neutral stance toward it. Similarly, if people out there genuinely do celebrate Columbus Day, renaming it while retaining its status as a federal holiday lets those people still celebrate it while also allowing the US government to be nominally more inclusive to Native American citizens who justifiably hate Columbus's guts.
Put another way, I disagree with Beroe's point that we'll end up with sterile and meaningless holidays. *Federal* holidays could easily become sterile and meaningless, but they already kind of are. Real holidays will be celebrated exactly as long as people care about them.
Dana: Coria, you have a good idea, but you're completely failing to understand the point of holidays. As Beroe said, they're about *myths*. They're about us, the living. Family and togetherness and gratitude. Gifts and joy and light. Renewal and hope and unsubtle metaphors. You can't just take a whole list of the most important figures: you need to start with the archetypes, the emotional goals, the *vibes*, and once you've assigned those, warp some reasonably close historical figures until they fit. Now, we'll toss Sanger, because that's complicated, and we're left with Columbus, Einstein, Edison, Washington, MLK, Disney, Franklin, Jonas Salk, Norman Borlaug, Susan B Anthony, and Louis Armstrong. Exploration, genius, dedication and entrepreneurship, bravery and honor, sticking to convictions in the face of overwhelming provocation, entertainment and joy, science and statesmanship (and we'll stick this one where Easter used to be), moral courage and innovation, and art. That's a pretty good list! But Salk and Borlaug take basically the same place, and that's already covered by Franklin. So as much as I respect your desire to honor the best and most important Americans, I can't agree with it. This is, incidentally, an argument for Henriette Lacks: she adds a theme and a tone that a list exclusively of the great and powerful can never capture.
The Modernist list (echoes of Comte, really) suggests we should create and celebrate the mythical character Armstrong, jazzman and astronaut extraordinaire. I'm all for it.
Thrasymachus really won this debate.
Coria at least avoided the false dichotomy but came up with a worse alternative. We need a way to ensure that a new holiday would be popular enough that people would forget all about the old holiday.
I suggest a contest. Contest entries should not only name the holiday but suggest fun activities for that day. The judges should be kids. They try out contest entries by actually having the holiday and reporting back on whether it was fun.
Pretty good. The only (minor) omission I think is the observation of the annoyance of the narcissism of the weak ally of an anti-holiday effort. If you have some personal reason to deeply hate Columbus, the historical figure -- his ancestors chopped off the hands of your ancestors, an Italian once betrayed your sister, whatever -- then I can respect your attempt to erase the man. Similarly, if you are passionately commited to the holiday because you think Italians get stereotyped as sister-betrayers too easily, or you think it concretizes the social value of honoring courage and daring (better than an "All Explorers' Day") then I can respect that, too. Banzai, and let the best shibboleth dominate by and by.
The person who is a weak ally of a holiday defense squad is being tediously tribal, but people are like that, and it's hard to expect more. But the person who is a weak ally of an anti-holiday movement is often a giant narcissist seeking attention. "You're all ignorant morons because you haven't thought of [insert tangentially relevant historical fact]. Only I with my massive brain/social conscience have seen it, and hereby bring this enlightenment to you. You may now gasp in wonder and admiration." Feh.
Bringing up Status Quo Bias in an argument about a tradition seems ridiculous to me. You can try to found a new tradition but you can't just create a pre-existing one, it will never be a tradition to the founding generation.
Beroe misses the point that Blue Tribe just got Juneteenth as a federal holiday so they can hold their horses for a bit. Personally I don't mind Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday as it was already an actual thing, and I wouldn't want it renamed to "Federal Holiday - Mid June" out of spite.
“All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites. Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre.”
I’m assuming this is a deliberate troll, but I’m still looking forward to Deiseach weighing in here. 🙂
"this list of people who saved the most lives" isn't a link, so I don't know what the list says.
I note that neither: “Nazis can hold rallies hailing Hitler, and when you challenge them, they can claim they’re talking about a mythical Hitler who, mythologically, did good things but not bad things.”
or: “That means that continuing to do so doesn’t pass a reversal test for status quo bias.”
includes a link to A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies. Probably for the best, even though it would be very relevant here.
Samuel Johnson's 'Debates in the Senate of Lilliput' might be the first good poet's use of 'Columban' to describe British settlements in the Americas as Columbian. Johnson was anti-colonialism all his life.
The part where Coria entered the argument had me in stiches. This is brilliantly written.
As somebody who is not a native American (and not a Native American either), I don't see a particular value for Columbus day for myself. I mean, I know about the mythos of Columbus, but if instead it'd be Benjamin Franklin day or Thomas Jefferson day or Plymouth Rock Worship day I wouldn't feel any difference.
But one thing I must object to here is that valuing the tradition by imagining its creation ex nihilo is the same as valuing it in the cultural context. If we wanted to create a human language, to be used for communication by majority of the world, be employed as pretty much unofficial official language of Science and Technology, and somebody would propose English as a candidate - they'd be laughed at, and maybe forcibly committed if they insisted. That does not imply we should spend all available effort to move away from English to some well-constructed Volapük. I am hearing some people crying out "jes ĝi faras!" right now but for the majority I think it's not the case. And if you did want to make such language, decreeing that starting Day X, every scientific paper is to be published in your favorite artificial language is probably not the best way to approach it. It would be lauded by some enthusiasts but would piss of many more people, I think, and be enormously destructive.
More and more, I believe holidays should be about celebrating and highlighting principles we value (like gratitude, generosity), not individual people or events. Ideally, they are aptly timed too, so a celebration of light comes at the darkest or brightest time of year, and a celebration of gratitude falls around harvest time.
Then, a good holiday is given color and meaning through rituals and myths that “show, don’t tell” the importance of those values and principles, and give the celebration the necessary “weight” and importance.
Christmas/New Year, Easter, Thanksgiving and many more traditional holidays got this right a long time ago (even if at least two of those have become far to dominated by the myth of the man). I don’t expect that’s because old cultures were wise enough to just know how holidays were supposed to work. I suspect it’s the other way around, that getting it right makes the holidays more sticky.
As such, I think both Colombus Day and Indigenous People’s Day fails.
So, incidentally, does 4th of July. Don’t get me wrong: It’s a good holiday, but instead of being a celebration of democracy, which maybe should have come on or near Election Day (or the other way around), it has become “big family picnic day” – which may also be important, but not as important as the thing we’re meant to celebrate.
It’s probably not a bad idea to have a holiday to celebrate adventure in the US, and one to celebrate diversity and inclusivity, and maybe a day or three to feel ashamed of how our ancestors treated each other, to commit to raise out own kids to be better than that, and to forgive each other. (And no, your particular blood line or skin tone will not get you out of that one.)
But if we want to make them sticky, let’s not name them after real, fallible people (even the best ones, like MLK), but something less vulnerable and more aspirational. Then, let’s make sure we build a structure of relevant rituals and sacrifices on top of it – and it can’t just be a parade with bag pipes. Ideally – but this is a bit much to ask of modern people – it’s something that requires a sacrifice, that brings home that the thing we value isn’t free. (No, not a bloody sacrifice. It could be a 24-hour fast, or keeping stores closed for a day, or slowing Internet down to 2G speeds for a day, or an expectation that people donate a day’s worth of work. Something relevant, though.)
When we anchor our holidays to our values, rather than specific events and individuals, we can tell myths about Columbus and his accomplishments, alongside stories about his cruelty and his inability to estimate the circumference of a globe, without celebrating him as a person. We can celebrate and share knowledge about all the peoples we want to include, in a way that can be true and real, and that fits modern and ever-evolving sensibilities.
And, over time, our stories can be filtered and the bad myths naturally replaced by better myths, that do a better job of representing the idea we want to hold on to. That will help us celebrate civil rights and democracy and shared history in a way that still allows us to tell amateur historians and contrarians to sit down, STFU and not ruin it for everybody else.
As someone who lives in a country with "early May", "late May" and "August" holidays, I assure you that having figured out the optimal number of holidays, you don't need to go on to the next step of agreeing historical figures to celebrate. You can just have holidays there.
Both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples' Day are fake holidays which, as far as I can tell, lack proper rites, as if people can just raise a mental flag to say "I'm celebrating Columbus" or "I'm celebrating indigenous peoples". Just give people the day off. If they happen to feel like celebrating something particular on the occasion, then they may.
"In the very unlikely chance that, a hundred years from now, the descendants of Aztecs are powerful and privileged, but the descendants of their sacrificial victims are marginalized..."
The descendants of Montezuma are dukes in the peerage of Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_of_Moctezuma_de_Tultengo
But among Mexican states, Tlaxcala isn't too poor and marginalised
Love this dialogue, and I appreciate hearing the perspectives espoused both there and in the comments! :)
If your going to design new holidays, why stick them to a particular historical figure?
Can't we have science day, friendship day, music day etc. Celebrating good things that are expressed by most humans to varying extents?
This really helped clarify for me why I like the dialogue format so much: if the author is arguing a straw man, it's much easier to identify in a dialogue format than in a traditional essay argument type argument (I found I understood how I disagreed with Plato more when his straw men made terrible arguments explicitly). Alternatively, if the author is intellectually honest (as here) the characters are allowed to give good points on each side.
I don't think the factual basis of holiday figures is as irrelevant as Beroe makes it out to be. I think the inspirational quality of the holiday can be indirectly affected by it.
Take Columbus Day. Say a kid gets inspired by the spirit of exploration and progress the mythical Columbus is supposed to embody, and wants to be just like him. Maybe she wants to find a scientific falsehood people in the modern day believe, and show everyone it's wrong, just like mythic Columbus did with the flat earth. Now how does she go about doing that?
Mythic Columbus knew the world was round, when everyone else thought it was flat. But how did he know? I don't think the stories say. He just knows somehow. And how did he know the earth was small enough that sailing around it was feasible, and his crew wouldn't die of thirst long before he crossed the ocean? Again, the myths don't concern themselves with that detail.
So mythic Columbus just knows, because he's a mythic explorer. You can't learn to be a mythic explorer, you just are one. Hearing stories about mythic Columbus can't teach you to be like him.
Now imagine if instead of Columbus day, we celebrated, say, Eratosthenes day, in recognition of his factually real accomplishment of figuring out the circumference of the earth. How can you be like Eratosthenes? Well, the stories, and the writings of the real Eratosthenes, are happy to tell you! You do it by inventing a really clever experiment involving shadows, and being sufficiently obsessed that you actually pay someone to walk from Alexandria to Syene and count how many steps it takes, so you can calculate the distance between them.
Historical figures who accomplished real, great things for humanity can teach you things. Because of their factuality, their achievements make sense, they are reducible to components. Their stories contain real evidence of what you need to do, how you need to think, how you ought to live your life, if you want to achieve great things yourself. To me, that just seems like a much more substantial and filling kind of inspiration than the kind you get from mythic explorers like Columbus.
This is fantastic - but you are entering a world of pain when you mention Eostre . . . https://historyforatheists.com/2017/04/easter-ishtar-eostre-and-eggs/
We should have a ‘Debunk the Eostre Myth’ day. It’s already celebrated regularly by many people.
>Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration.
Ok, I'll bite. No-one knows when Jesus was born. The clues in the gospels are sparse and contradictory. The Nativity wasn't widely celebrated as a festival until the fourth century.
Hippolytus of Rome put the date at 25 December in the early 3rd century. He writes (in the Commentary on Daniel), "For the first advent of our Lord in the flesh, when he was born in Bethlehem, was December 25th, Wednesday, while Augustus was in his forty-second year, but from Adam, five thousand and five hundred years. He suffered in the thirty-third year, March 25th, Friday, the eighteenth year of Tiberius Caesar, while Rufus and Roubellion were Consuls." It's probably not a coincidence that this places the Annunciation on 25th March, coinciding with the date given for Good Friday. At any rate, Hippolytus isn't fixing the date of a festival. If anything, he's concerned with fitting Christ's chronology to Daniel's prophecies.
Saturnalia fell on 17 December and continued until 23 December. The festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti did fall on 25 December, but this is itself a late invention, not attested earlier than 354, but plausibly instituted by Aurelian (who created the cult of Sol Invictus), who reigned 270-275. That of course postdates Hippolytus, so while it remains possible that the Church ultimately fixed 25 December as the date of the Nativity to compete with Aurelian's festival, it's equally possible that Aurelian chose the date in an attempt to suppress nascent Christian celebrations on that day.
Something that would be interesting to thing about / that I can’t grasp clearly right now is how holidays that start as political/religious events like Indigenous Colombus Day or Christmas or May Day eventually turn into Big Family Picnic/Dinner/Long Weekend Day and end up losing their intended significance, while still contributing to bringing us together. I mean, even Christmas, it used to be religiously minor, and the church was more interested in Easter, but it somehow caught on in the population, was gradually stripped of its religiously significant stuff* and now is hardly a religious holiday at all. And yet it’s the stereotypical example of what we like in holidays, that they bring us together, are traditions, etc.
I guess it may have to do with the actual underlying beliefs: May Day where I’m from used to be huge among workers, because they had a strongly shared working-class culture, but is now only a long weekend for anyone other than very committed trade unionists and left-wing student activists. However, even when it was really big, it never really seems to have caught on among non-working class people. That’s kind of a problem if you want your holidays to help your nation-building, because having holidays built upon specific examples of people, behaviours, what-have-yous, is good for that, but harder than to agree on than a Day of Generally Not Being Too Much of an Asshole, or a Day of That Specific Foodstuff that The Whole Country Thinks Tastes Great, or something.
* Before the 1950s in France, Christmas still had important religious elements including the fact that the presents were mostly brought to children by the Little Jesus, who in the 1950s was gradually replaced by Father Christmas/Santa Claus, leading to the following wonderful anecdote:
In 1951 in Dijon, clerics burned at the stake a straw effigy of Santa in protest against the de-christianization of Christmas. Just so you know it happened and can have fun imagining what it looked like.
Enjoyable.
I could (could have?) cared less about Columbus Day until Mariano A. Lucca started pushing for a greater recognition of it as a holiday and the whole Italian American “thing” blew up with the popularity of “The Godfather” stirring the gravy. Still could care less. But this post is both fun to read and enlightening.
Why not “Slaves and Oppressed Peoples Day”?
> suppose we were to replace Christmas with another holiday that tested equally well in focus groups. It had just as much potential for holiday specials, provided just as much of an excuse to get together with family, even had delightful mythological characters who, starting ex nihilo, would have just as much appeal as Santa. Would you feel like something had been lost?
I have had weird feelings reading this. I am from Russia, and this precisely what has happened here (without focus groups though). In soviet era, Christmas was banned as too religious, and replaced with New Year celebrations (in the night from 31st of December to the 1st of January), which are as massive a holiday as Christmas is in the US. For New Year, families come together, decorate a spruce tree (which is called a New Year Tree rather than a Christmas Tree), and give each other presents which are supposedly distributed by Grandfather Frost, who is totally not Santa Claus despite being an old jolly bearded guy giving the presents. (He has evolved from the East Slavic mythology rather Cristianity, so while he was briefly banned, the soviet government was much less strict about that, as, in accordance with the post, they feared Pagan opposition much less than Christian opposition). And Christmas in Russia is mostly celebrated by people who are indeed religious.
And yes, in Russia we are kind of without tradition with regard to national holidays, because all the main ones are at most soviet-era old. The most popular are The New Year, The International Women's Day and the Day of Protectors of the Fatherland (Progressives in Russia have been to change the nature of both of them for years: to make the Women's Day more about feminism and awareness of Women's rights, rather than flowers, beauty and "We wish you to smile more and to be a decoration of your work team"; and to demilitarise the discourse around the Protector's day and just turn it into Man's Day, like it works in school, where girls give boys gifts for Protector's Day, and boys give girls gift for Women's Day), and the Labour Day and Victory Day (the has also been attempted to get demilitarised for years, to be turned from belligerent weapons demonstrations into a day of grief for those who have died in WWII, of whom there are a few in practically every Russian family history). So yeah, we live in a country with a short tradition of holidays, and there are lots of clashes around them.
Also, I have just read on Wikipedia that in Ukraine there is a movement to change the focus from New Year to Christmas again, because New Year is associated with the Soviet past. I don't have any personal evidence on whether this is true, however.
Coria's proposal seems like it comes from a super weird place in terms of the understanding of culture it implies.
For as much as holidays are secularized in modern societies, and particularly in American culture(s), one thing I got in part from your recent-ish post on Pride and 4th of July celebrations, is that, if you look closely and don't let yourself be blinded by your preconceptions of what you *should* be seeing, it's plain as day that the animating spirits are usually the same old deities that humans have been throwing parties for for millennia, plus some younger gods that emerged out of the Enligtenment.
Here it's the myth of the frontier, of the brave explorer setting out for the unknown, which casts its shadow in the shape of a colonizer, a transgressor of boundaries who re-casts the world he discovers in his own image VS the myth of multiplicity and difference, of the beauty and inherent worth of the world in all of its particularities, which casts its shadow in the dissolution of the individual, which exists as individual insofar as it posits itself against that multiplicity.
When I think about the discourse around national holidays in terms of these symbolic undercurrents, even the apparently silly arguments often don't seem as trivial anymore. We have a kind of unresolved mythological contradiction in our culture, and people don't agree on what the pantheon should look like in some pretty crucial places.
Coria's apparently rational solution of just celebrating random people who happen to be well-loved by the average modern American also can't help you here, since the process by which you decide what to celebrate is what tells you what you really celebrate.
If you come up with a totally rational system for what your national holidays should be, and rationality is the sole determining factor, then all of your national holidays will ultimately be a celebration of rationality, and people who worship other gods in their hearts (freedom, justice, forgiveness, tradition, progress, etc.) aren't going to feel represented by that.
They'll know with every festival they attend that in your nation there is only one true god, and any other virtues are only valid insofar as they are justified through him.
Not that the god of truth doesn't have a strong claim to the title of one true god, but if you trick people into worshipping him, you're really just tricking them into worshipping the god of tricking people into worshipping things if it serves the greater good.
I'm pretty sure the Indigenous People’s Day side would hate the mythological Columbus as well, since he still represents the Great Man conception of history. Asking them to imagine a good colonist is like asking leftists to imagine a good billionaire - the archetype is hopelessly corrupted. Even in a sanitized version of the myth where natives do not exist, Columbus' journey still led to widespread ecological damage to the Americas.
(Amusingly, I've recently become aware of the I-don't-know-how-serious idea of Genghis Khan being an ecological hero, since his decimation of world population caused a noticeable reduction in carbon emissions. So maybe being pro-Human is overrated nowadays.)
A nice story.
Yeah, Italian-Americans tend to care about the holiday. Even if we didn't pick Columbus - note a WASP picked him for us. But by golly we'll take what we were given. And once something is given, the receiver generally doesn't want a gift taken back. (Do NOT insert culturally insensitive and unjust stereotyping slur here.)
(I will note that my mom would also sometimes let us skip school on 3/19, St. Joseph's day in celebration of being an Italian American. It probably is worth noting that the county of my childhood is named after St. Joe and since there was already a local tradition of celebrating Polish Americans (Dyngus Day) where we'd also get day off, a special day seemed appropriate.) Dyngus Day is also now combined with Solidarity Day, a parallel celebration of local black Americans. And of course there were always St. Patrick's day events given the Irish at the local French school.
But I personally have no problem with the red paint thrown on Columbus statutes. I prefer to imagine it is ragu rather than blood. That kind of baptism would be a great permanent addition to the Holiday to symbolically remind us of both pasta sauce and genocide.
We need symbols of benign granfallons, if only as a slapstick program to be "lonesome no more".
Lacking such benign symbols as salve for alienation, it is easy to turn to putting on red MAGA hats or joining a gang or adopting KKK identities or storming the Capitol.
This is the best thing I've read in quite a while. Thanks, Scott.
Superb! This is your old voice Scott, keep 'em coming!
I'm not an American but from what people say, aside from some Italian-Americans nobody cares that much about Columbus Day for the sake of Columbus (correct me if I'm wrong). In that sense if it suddenly disappeared and was magically replaced with another holiday nothing much would be missing - people would still get their day off. The problem is that trying to replace it with an anti-holiday (as you say) comes across as "the status of your ingroup should be lowered, and ours raised". So it's not so much a matter of losing Columbus himself as not wanting to seen to lose a symbolic cultural battle.
I feel like Leif Erikson Day is an under appreciated compromise. First and most importantly, his expedition is the one that first closed the circle of human exploration into a loop around the entire world. Second, while he wasn't a saint he wasn't a monster either. Misunderstandings created conflicts with the native Americans but all things being equal he preferred to peacefully trade with them.
The best bit was the end. That *is* how we make philosophical progress.
This is a fantastic exchange. I only want to interject that the folk history of Christmas being intentionally established on December 25th in order to capitalize on the pagan holiday is disputed by biblical historians. Here is a decent exploration of the matter by Yale Divinity School professor Andrew McGowan: https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/jesus-historical-jesus/how-december-25-became-christmas/
The question of "which holidays?" is of course, at base a question of power.
From this, Indigenous People's Day (and Colombus Day a century and a half earlier) are exercises in virtue signaling, but the reason that these gestures signal(ed) virtue in the first place is because they conform(ed) to the class ideology of the hegemonic classes at the time.
In other words, the hegemonic class (the Professional Managerial Class In 2022 and the Propertied Gentry in 1890) gets to decide what is normative, what goes without saying. For that matter, this is why celebrating Colombus Day is today seen as a bit retrograde. You need to get with the program.
A couple centuries ago, almost nobody would have questioned that some were born to rule and others to serve.
Tecumseh Day.
>You changed “society is preventing pogroms against a marginalized group” to “left-wingers are cynically milking people for their votes”, so yes, I would say it is substantially different.
At this point, my pre-conception makes A's argument kinda baffling. How many pogroms, since 1977 (the creation of IPD, apparently) did american natives suffer? This seems to be straight up "making up a problem to which agreeing with me is the solution".
>the Mongols are celebrating him for fine, pro-human reasons like bravery and tactical brilliance - so we let it pass.
I'm ready to bet the Mongols are celebrating him for being a great conqueror, which is a similar reason for why I'd celebrate Colombus if I were a white american: because he was a great explorer who granted my peoples an entire continent to strive in. If he had, in fact, found a powerful Cipangu or Cathay already holding the land he discovered, his fame would have been a blip, a name you learn in class & remember for trivial pursuit nights, but not "two state capitals, a big river, 3 spacecrafts and a godess".
Overall, really, B is unconvincing, but A is ludicrous. I'd almost suspect Scott wrote them to make C's insanity more appealing.
The ghost of Hal Finney enters the chat:
"Mass mediated culture died with the first TCP connection. Arguments over what 'we' should do end up elucidating that there may be no such thing as 'we', and to the extent that it exists, it is certainly no longer programmable as it once was."
Well this is just great. Holding a torch for Coria over here.
Celebrating (or more accurately, "observing" because no one is having a heap big party, except for the Canadians) Indigenous People's Day is not quite about having an anti-holiday to neutralize Columbus Day. It's not a perfect particle-antiparticle reaction that gives off useful energy. It's a humiliation ritual. When you have vanquished your foe, you must smash his idols and desecrate his holy places. It's a practice as old as civilization. Columbus is an idol of the oppressive system that has been defeated. Some holdouts may not accept that they have been defeated, but the grinding of Columbus idols into dust will show them.
Morrison enters the fray:
A, B, and C seem to accept as a given that Columbus was a horrible, vicious person. This may be the case, but nearly all of the horrible things he supposedly did were reported by a single source, a Spaniard named Francisco de Bobadilla who was sent (in 1499) to evaluate how things were going. Most of his negative information was supplied by enemies of Columbus. Needless to say, there is a great deal of back and forth controversy about the truth of Bobadilla's assertions.
Columbus was probably no worse than your average adventurer in terms of evil. What he is celebrated for is opening the "new world" to the "old world," and vice versa. He found it and publicized it. It was one of the most consequential events in the last thousand years. That puts him way ahead of anyone else in the explorer league. If his voyage and exploration had ended like Leif Ericsson's, we would not celebrate him.
By the way, in Columbus' time, no one believed the Earth was flat. The issue that made it hard for Columbus to get support was that essentially all learned people believed the Earth's circumference was around 24,000 miles, following Eratosthenes. Columbus believed it was much smaller (or at least pretended to believe that) and therefore provides a shorter voyage the to "Indies."
Why is Einstein on the list of notable americans? He lived in the US for only the last 22 years of this life, long after the creative period of his career which happened in Switzerland and Germany.
The older I get, the more acceptable I think it is to judge people's morals based on the time they lived in. Columbus was cutting hands in a historical period when everybody with power was cutting hands, including our very ancestors.
Many people are pointing this or that out about the Christmas discussion, but it looks like the most important point has yet to be mentioned:
Arius had it coming. The practice of punching those supposed church leaders who are his theological descendants should be normalized and celebrated.
European's first reaction to "Indigenous People's Day": that's a real dick move guys. Not to Columbus, but to indigenous people.
Native Americans should 100% get a day. But putting that day on the anniversary of when white people showed up and started wiping them out seems really... white-centric (I live in the right-wing universe, so I don't know the lingo - I assume there's a word for this). You'll be celebrated on the day we discovered you! It's also kind of insensitive, along the lines of celebrating Japan day on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. It's also a bit random to celebrate US Native Americans on the day that Columbus discovered an entirely different part of North America.
Galaxy brain take: if I were Cherokee or whatever, I think I'd be more offended by this than Columbus day.
The main thing is that Native Americans are a pretty invisible group who are, because of history, generally living in bad situations. (Drive through some of the Nations out West if you want to be depressed.) What can we do to maybe improve that situation?
Instead of perpetuating the myth of the Great (Wo)men of history - celebrate great events instead.
http://www.mattglassman.com/?p=2789
Instead of Columbus or Armstrong or Sacagawea celebrate Expanding Frontiers and throw in all of them and more.
China has Single's Day and Japan celebrates "White Day" that is all about giving white-colored gifts. Japan also celebrates Christmas with eating Kentucky Fried Chicken and playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and without the slightest care about the thing that Save Our Christmas people think is Christmas.
I thought his name was Cristoforo Colombo?
Four quick comments:
It's mildly surprising that Columbus Day hasn't yet been appropriated with Columbus representing modern American entrepreneurship: Silicon Valley billionaires who promised something they couldn't deliver but nonetheless were able to obtain massive amounts of venture capital.
The demotion of Columbus Day is analogous to the demotion of Confederate Civil War monuments, in that both represent cultural heroes to one group of Americans and genocide to another group of Americans.
I'd never imagined Indigenous Peoples Day as celebrating IP outside the United States, but substitute Comanche for Aztec and the blog argument still works.
Why do we celebrate Labor Day by not working?
Adraste's point about the movement of Easter and Christmas are so historically inaccurate it is infuriating. Tim O'Neill has written pages on why this is complete nonsense from a historical perspective. A lot of the post-hoc rationalizations about why Christians would or would not have been motived to do this ignore mountains of historical data that it was not a cynical ploy to replace one cultural celebration with another.
Please stop recycling these tropes about Christian holidays.
"Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration. Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre."
These two are related, so I'm going to deal with them together. To the first, "kind of", to the second, "not just nope but heck nope!"
The Tangled Question of Easter:
Saying that Easter "neutralised the rites of the spring goddess Eostre" needs to be unpacked. The milder reading is "everyone was having such a blast celebrating Easter that they forgot about Eostre". The stronger reading is "Easter was invented to replace Eostre's cult" (this can be a Pagan and Wiccan claim, though not solely and not completely). You know who I'm going to quote on this one:
https://historyforatheists.com/2022/04/easter-pagan/
So! First of all, we have to figure out "Was there even a goddess Eostre?" and the evidence for that is pretty thin. Ironically in this context, the reason English-speaking world talks about "Easter comes from Eostre" is due to a work by the Christian monk the Venerable Bede (now Saint Bede, having finally been canonised in 1899, 1,164 years after his death in 735. He's been called "the Venerable" for so long that that is how he is still generally referred to). Bede was a skilled linguist and translator, and one of his important works was De temporum ratione/The Reckoning of Time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reckoning_of_Time
This is important, because it tackles the question of how to compute the date of Easter, which was A Very Big Important Problem for the church calendar. I'll get back to this when considering the first part, about when was Jesus born, but let's stick with Easter for the minute. As well as showing off his scholarship and learning about Greek, Roman, Hebrew and other measures of time, "He gives some information about the months of the Anglo-Saxon calendar."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bede#Historical_and_astronomical_chronology
Buckle up, kids, this is where we take off. When Bede was talking briefly about the Anglo-Saxon calendar, he mentioned Eostre or rather the month name derived from her:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre
"The Old English deity Ēostre is attested solely by Bede in his 8th-century work The Reckoning of Time, where Bede states that during Ēosturmōnaþ (the equivalent of April), pagan Anglo-Saxons had held feasts in Ēostre's honour, but that this tradition had died out by his time, replaced by the Christian Paschal month, a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus."
And that is it. That is the *only* place anyone talks about or mentions Eostre (that we have records of). So where did we get Bryan Singer's [American Gods](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv83-BzdOEE) "hey, Jesus stole your month, girl"? Invented out of whole cloth, more or less. The 18th-19th century craze for going back to Ze Ancient Authentic Native Folk Traditions involved a lot of folk etymology, even by the scholars of the day, and they went a bit wild with Eostre.
Do we even know for sure that she is associated with spring? Not definitely, it's an assumption because her month was in the Northern European spring season. Rabbits (should be hares, as in 'mad as a March hare' because hares mate in spring), eggs and the like are all spring related, but we don't even know that decorating eggs for Easter *is* an Eostre tradition, rather than a Christian one; the same way eggs, milk, butter and sugar are used up on Pancake Tuesday/Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras, before Lent begins, then decorating eggs which could once again be eaten freely in Spring once Easter came is likely to be as much Christian as anything else.
Side note: out of curiosity, I looked up when the first chocolate Easter eggs were introduced:
"Chocolate eggs first appeared at the court of Louis XIV in Versailles and in 1725 the widow Giambone in Turin started producing chocolate eggs by filling empty chicken egg shells with molten chocolate. In 1873 J.S. Fry & Sons of England introduced the first chocolate Easter egg in Britain. Manufacturing their first Easter egg in 1875, Cadbury created the modern chocolate Easter egg after developing a pure cocoa butter that could be moulded into smooth shapes."
So, chocolate Easter eggs is a late 19th century creation, like many of our current traditions.
So "Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre" is like saying "We celebrate the Fourth of July, with its anti-monarchical emphases, to neutralise the honours paid to Julius Caesar". You could more easily say that "Passover neutralises the rites of the spring goddess" because of the connections with the Vernal Equinox and the Christian feast of the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Christ. I don't think anybody is going to argue (but who knows? I have not plumbed the depths of all the Internet) that "The Jews totally invented Passover just to take over the established celebration for Eostre".
Which brings us back to the Easter dating controversy, part of which was that some places in the early Church celebrated it at the same time as Passover was being celebrated, and there were others who wanted to make it very distinct that "We're not Jewish and this is not a Jewish feast". Another large part was calendar drift, hence the various works on "this is how you work out what day it falls on" since Easter is a moveable feast, which returns us neatly to St. Bede and the Anglo-Saxons 😀
Now, taking the first part, second, when was Jesus born? The short answer is, we don't know, we can't even say He was born in the spring since nobody had an exact time or date. What happened was that Easter was always the most important feast of the church calendar, and the celebration of the birth was a much more minor event (partly because of the theology, partly because we had a definite date for Easter). Theories of the time held that important and celebrated individuals had symbolic and important dates in their lives, and that the date of death of such a person was related to the date of their birth.
This would mean that you would be celebrating both Christ's birth and death on the same dates, which would be confusing - it does happen sometimes, that March 25th (Lady Day) which has been set as the date of the Annunciation is also the date of Good Friday (Easter being a moveable feast) so both are celebrated, or commemorated, at the same time, as in Donne's poem when the same thing happened in 1608:
http://my-albion.blogspot.com/2016/03/upon-annunciation-and-passion-falling.html
And to quote his description of Mary, mother of Christ:
"She sees at once the Virgin Mother stay
Reclused at home, public at Golgotha ;
Sad and rejoiced she's seen at once, and seen
At almost fifty, and at scarce fifteen ;
At once a son is promised her, and gone ;
Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John ;
Not fully a mother, she's in orbity ;
At once receiver and the legacy."
Confusing, yes? So the Easter date of the definite death of Christ was maintained, and the spring date was given to celebrate His conception (not birth). Move on nine months from conception to birth, which brings us neatly to December and the proper distance between the two.
That the Winter Solstice is in this period probably is important, but was it picked to "neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration"? As I said, yes and no; the Easter distinction was more important, but that people were familiar with a winter festival probably didn't hurt either (I don't lean too heavily on the Sol Invictus thing since that's really about winter festivals in general, not direct "the Church took this particular feast over").
And here we end!
I’m not sure the other examples of “Anti-Holiday” given are really “anti” the same way Indigenous Peoples Day is. Moving Easter and Christmas to sit on top of existing pagan holidays was more like “we’re a proselytizing religion trying to make converts in a place where the people demand a big winter solstice and spring equinox party, so let’s bolt some Christian mythology onto the existing pagan traditions, that way everybody gets to have the same party but we can say the prayers are going to Jesus now. Win-win!” Hanukkah, kind of the same thing - the people demand a big end of year holiday, so let’s bolt on the nearest Jewish holiday and make that one a big deal.
The “invented from whole cloth to make people feel guilty” nature of IPD is I think unique. If you wanted an analogue to the other “anti-holidays”, IPD would need to co-opt existing Columbus Day traditions so the people celebrating CD aren’t put out. But a) no one really celebrates CD anymore outside of a few Italian-American communities, and b) the IPD equivalent would be a big parade and feast that the same people promoting IPD would find to be offensive cultural appropriation.
“Sacagawea Day” is actually a good idea, in that a day to celebrate Indian and European cooperation and exploration would be a much better way to co-opt CD. Everyone can have a big party and not feel guilty. Then again our national religion already has an Indian European cooperation myth, and we use it for Thanksgiving.
So really the right thing to do would to just be to let Columbus Day die off, but we can’t do that because government workers will be pissed about having a contractual day of paid leave in October removed.
My belief is that Indigenous People's Day should only be celebrated in Kenya (or maybe Tanzania), because people aren't indigenous to anywhere else.
I'm always amused at the take on Christian history that are casually thrown out for glib, um, galaxy-brained bon mots. In this case, pretending that St. Nicholas just sorta up and attacked some poor rando at Nicaea. But it does make for good copy amongst the non-religious crowd I suppose.
I'm high up on the anti-woke scale, but OK with Columbus being cancelled...this dialogue did a nice job of fleshing out why. The enslaving and genociding is inextricable from his success. On the other hand, "Indigenous People's Day" is a little cringey for reasons also delineated, but what can you do? Everyone needed their mid-October holiday I guess? But could we have pushed it back to Nov. 1 as a recovery day from Halloween?
Do we need federal holidays at all? It seems like their main significance in closing governmental offices that are supposed to be serving the public. If you want federal employees to have days off, just give them vacation days that they can take without shutting down services that the public can need.
[I realize employers may not take kindly to too many employees taking voluntary vacation days simultaneously, but that seems like a minor employment policy issue, whose solution need not be official federal holidays.]
And would there be any loss to "culture" from not having Columbus day be federally recognized? Or any holiday for that matter? Columbus's enduring cultural resonance is probably a function of kids learning about him in history - not the federal holiday.
Similarly, it seems unlikely that Christmas would lose its cultural significance were it not an official federal holiday, but rather merely a day on which many if not most employees chose to spend with family, doing Christmasy things.
Speaking of Christmas, it seems odd to omit discussion of the centuries of horror unleashed by Christians and Christianity in a discussion about a holiday celebrating the birth of Christianity. It seems like an even stronger example of point about Columbus - that the perception of figures, events, or movements, can differ radically from group to group, and from dry history to living cultural endurance.
Instead of celebrating flawed individual people, we should reserve holidays for uncontroversial advancements, like Indoor Plumbing Day or Pre-Sliced Bread Day. Problem solved.
BTW, Columbus' whole voyage was premised on his belief that everyone else had overcalculated the circumference of the globe and therefore Asia was really only a few thousand miles off the coast of Europe. So he was a contrarian who got everything wrong but still succeeded. Better lucky than smart is the lesson, I guess.
"Allow me to try a hostile rephrasing of your point. There is no such thing as genuine heroism worth celebrating, or traditions worth keeping - only raw power. "
I love this. And this article in general. So many brilliant arguments presented in a fun way.
I don't think replacing "Columbus Day" with "Indigenous People’s Day" is very politically savvy, if the goal is anything but "maximizing controversy". From the other comments, I read that Columbus Day is for the Italian Americans what St. Patrick's Day is for the Irish American.
If it turned out that St. Patrick was Problematic (because he was anti snakes or whatever), then just gradually renaming it for some other famous Irish person or thing would be the way to go. Replacing it with Orange Snake Day will probably not be very successful.
Then again, the assumption that the goal of the people in favor of renaming might mostly be to minimize offending minorities might be overly charitable. Optimizing for controversy fits well with my model of how the culture war works. "Who cares if some privileged white minority uses this day to celebrate their heritage rather than colonialism. Causing a big stink will raise so much more awareness."
I think there is a relevant Simpsons episode about the founder of Springfield and if he should be celebrated even though he was a pirate in reality or something.
This doesn't even get into the question of what exactly an "indigenous" person is. Is a Quechua person in Maine, thousands of miles and a continent away from his homeland, an "indigenous" person?
Despite this being a pretty fantastic dialogue, I can't help but think you started from the pun of "Columbian exchange" and worked backward from there.
Question for UK or Commonwealth readers: What's the discourse around Guy Fawkes Day like these days?
I feel like it's an interesting counterpoint to this discussion. Columbus Day was created expressly as a means of promoting acceptance of a Catholic population in a heavily Protestant society. It existed as a blandly uncontroversial, largely unnoticed holiday for 90 years or so before turning into a culture war flash point, especially in recent years.
Guy Fawkes Day was created to celebrate England's identity as a Protestant state and show hostility to Catholicism. It spread to the colonies and was centuries a vehicle for anti-Catholic sentiment. Then at some point -- maybe after the Troubles? -- it settled down into what people apparently decided was just a fun innocuous affair with fireworks or something.
Is there some sort of model there for how a holiday can be declawed of its past divisiveness without needing to be completely rebranded or detached from all historical meaning? Or do people still fight over Guy Fawkes and I just don't hear about it here in the USA?
"I’ll just be standing over here in the corner in case you decide you like truth and goodness."
I think Adraste and Beroe could agree to celebrate "Let's Beat The Stuffing Out Of Coria Day".
As for suggested historical figures, next year Coria will be tut-tutting some of the selected, just like Adraste with Columbus Day, so here goes with my best "but why do you hate truth and goodness?" dying duck impersonation:
"There are plenty of lists of the greatest historical figures. Taking this one, selecting for only Americans or America-related people, and removing people too similar to each other, we get Columbus, Einstein, Edison, Washington, MLK, Disney, Franklin, Jonas Salk, Margaret Sanger, Susan B Anthony, and Louis Armstrong. We could combine it with this list of people who saved the most lives, of which the Americans are Maurice Hilleman, Henrietta Lacks, Jonas Salk, and Norman Borlaug - I think a good consensus list for both influential and moral might replace one of Columbus, Sanger or Franklin with Borlaug, and keep the rest."
Columbus is already on the no-no list. As for the rest -
Einstein. No-no, or have you already forgotten his sexism, misogyny, and stealing the work of his wife?
Work of first wife: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of-einsteins-first-wife/
Cruelty to second wife: https://allthatsinteresting.com/elsa-einstein
Edison - tsk-tsk. Relentless self-publicist, mired in controversies over who actually first invented the inventions he claimed, took the credit for discoveries made by employees, and involved with inventing the electric chair. Do you really want to honour someone who ghoulishly profited off the death penalty, bearing in mind the carceral state that disproportionately punishes minorities?
https://theconversation.com/thomas-edison-visionary-genius-or-fraud-99229
Washington - George or Carver? If the first, no-no again. Enslaver who, while not quite as bad as Thomas Jefferson, was still bad. Read this reparative creative work by a Nebula award winner and get educated:
https://firesidefiction.com/the-secret-lives-of-the-nine-negro-teeth-of-george-washington
Disney - Walt? No-no again, remember "Song of the South":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_the_South#Controversies
Franklin - as in Ben? As in the Founding Fathers? Who were all racists, remember, who founded the Electoral College so slave-holding states could be represented, and this is why we never had the First Female President who would have brought about the Green Economy utopia :
https://time.com/4558510/electoral-college-history-slavery/
Margaret Sanger - not everybody likes Margaret Sanger and her work, but they're only right-wing religious bigot -ists and -phobes, so eff 'em!
Susan B. Anthony - no-no again. Pro-Temperance Movement (the Prohibition of its day) and anti-abortion.
MLK, Salk and Armstrong don't seem to have anything against them, but you never know what secrets might come to light. Better not take the chance!
I think both Adraste and Beroe are assuming that "culture" is some unchanging thing, and that modifying traditions/holidays/etc is inherently negative. America's treatment of Native Americans (including both demonization and idolization) has been a significant part of its culture since its founding, and I think this holiday changing merely reflects our culture's changing attitudes. As such, the change preserves culture, rather than undermining it.
My actual suggestion would be Mayflower Day.
I'm not sure if it's true that Columbus Day was invented as a sop to Italian-Americans or not, but it has become a more general celebration of the European discovery and settlement of the Americas. This (rather than Columbus' own personal failings) is why "they" want to take it away, and it's why White Americans take attacks on Columbus Day as attacks on themselves.
Shifting the celebration to Mayflower Day gives us a day that we can celebrate the European settlement of the Americas while avoiding controversy around the less nice aspects of Colombo himself. It also has the advantage of being directly relevant to the USA rather than to some nearby islands. One slight problem is that the Mayflower landed on 11-11 which is already a holiday, but shifting it to the day the Mayflower left England (September 6) seems like a good compromise that gives a much-needed late summer holiday.
Perhaps, I didn't look over the comments diligently enough, but when discussing made up holidays, no one cited Frank Costanza's "Festivus" (for the rest of us)?
I'm bothered by a couple iterations of this:
[quote]Adraste: And you’re not being idealistic with your argument that we should never celebrate any holiday for anyone who has ever been associated with bad things? Except for Columbus, an exception you still haven’t even slightly explained?[/quote]
It leaves Beroe in a weird spot. Adraste says he can't celebrate Columbus day, that they are in conflict because he does. The usual reason for that is that Adraste-types say we can't have a holiday for any historic figure who ever did a bad thing. He points out an inconsistency between that statement and what the other person wants him to do, which is that the holiday the other person is trying to replace this guy's with is for flawed people as well.
Scott lets Adraste look at that and go "Now you are the person demanding we cancel holidays and replace them unless people sinless. And the burden of proof is on you, not me, the person who made the demand".
If Beroe has to defend both his position and Adrastes, he's in trouble - how could he possibly win? A good example of the implications are within the article; he doesn't NEED the Chrisanta Clausllumbus argument at the point he uses it; at the point the ball is still in Adraste's court to prove he isn't just stoking racial conflict using an inconsistantly applied principle.
"Labor Day was invented to screw up Communists’ attempts to coordinate around May Day as a labor protest holiday."
This is an interesting one, because the Communists themselves were appropriating a traditional holiday. May Day has been celebrated all over Europe forever:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Day
Though this article claims it was picked by the American labour movement because of a strike that took place on 1st May:
"(T)he date was chosen in 1889 for political reasons by the Marxist International Socialist Congress, which met in Paris and established the Second International as a successor to the earlier International Workingmen's Association. They adopted a resolution for a "great international demonstration" in support of working-class demands for the eight-hour day. The date had been chosen by the American Federation of Labor to continue an earlier campaign for the eight-hour day in the United States, which had been the cause of a general strike beginning on 1 May 1886, and culminated in the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago four days later."
In 1955, the Church dedicated the 1st May to St. Joseph the Worker as a counterbalance to the socialist/communist/labour holiday. So everybody has been getting in on the game of "who can take May Day for their own?"
A line of argument that Beroe hints at but never directly articulates is that the very concept of “Indigenous People” is extremely Eurocentric, something you would expect Adraste to be sensitive to.
For one thing, the people in question aren’t necessarily “indigenous” (or especially “First People”). What they actually are are just the people who happened to be here when the European colonists started arriving. There are actually thousands of years of many evolving and warring cultures that rose and fell since the “first people” actually arrived.
The “indigenous” that the Europeans encountered were not in every case particularly old cultures. “Oxford is older than the Aztecs” for example, and of course our primary conception of the Plains Indians involves them chasing bison on horses, which of course are an animal that didn’t exist in North America until the Spaniards brought them. Not America, but the “indigenous” Māori of New Zealand only got there 400 years before Cook did.
Now, the Australian Aboriginals, THOSE dudes are Indigenous.
For another thing lumping them all into “Indigenous People” is a remarkably arrogant act of cultural flattening for diverse peoples that differed greatly in their cultures and lifestyles and quite often didn’t particularly care for the other groups of Indigenous People around them.
> Hanukkah was originally a minor celebration of a third-tier Bible story; American Jews bumped it up several notches of importance in order to neutralize Christmas.
This is incorrect: The Hanukkah story is post-biblical. Regarding how it got elevated in the US, I'm not sure the explanation given is correct either. :/
I would like to point out to Coria that the *last* person who tried rationalizing holidays to replace all those dumb superstitious ones ended up with his head chopped off on the day he had dedicated to the contemplation of lettuce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabre_d%27%C3%89glantine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
Like d'Eglantine's rationalized holidays, proposing secular vacation days to celebrate the in vogue morals of the days often ends up as embarrassing, cold-oatmeal kitsch, of which both Columbus Day and Indigenous People's day are good example. (Oats by the way, should be contemplated on the 2nd of Messidor.)
I will give Corria credit for at least trying to substitute secular saints for religious ones, but I'm not sure you can ultimately separate "holiday" from a community centered around celebration of a "holy day" (and I wish Federal and State governments would stop trying to impose them from above).
To me, it seems like "Indigenous Peoples' Day" as a US holiday ought to be focused specifically on the indigenous people who live (or lived) within the area that is now the US, and the ways in which their knowledge and customs influenced the development of modern American culture. So any objection concerning indigenous people living elsewhere (Aztecs, Incas) doesn't strike me as particularly relevant.
I think it's also worth pointing out that we do have a longstanding holiday in November that already celebrates that specific thing (the contributions of specific indigenous people to early settlers in the US and their influence on development of modern American culture). But, strangely enough, that holiday isn't a particularly popular one nowadays...
The fact that [this list](https://wmich.edu/mus-gened/mus150/biography100.html) includes Bill Gates but not John von Neumann or Alan Turing makes me mildly suspicious of it.
I think it's generally anti-republican (little r) to have holidays celebrating specific people in general. President's Day or Independence Day or Labor Day or whatever are a better model for civic holidays. They celebrate events or traits or broad groups but not specific people. And it has the added advantage that there is neither a mythical or real person at the center so you are reduced to fighting over the general principle. Yes, there's a fight over Independence Day but it's a fight over whether the country itself is good. Which is a more interesting and relevant fight than whether Christopher Columbus specifically was X or Y. (Which ends up being a stand in for something modern anyway.)
Speaking of, when are the Rationalists going to get together and make a holiday?
Well, that clears things up considerably! Thank you for the education on the King(or previously) the Queen’s English.
We could rename Columbus Day as Colonial Day, and use it to estimate the amount of wealth extracted from colonized nations by all the colonizing empires. But then we should do a second calculation of the amount of wealth that might have been extracted by the 'exploited' nations, if they had had the technology and will to monetize their wealth themselves.
It could be argued that the United States colonized New Spain's northern frontier and exploited its minerals, but they had to counter raiding, financial failures, etc. Do the Americans colonizers apologize to Mexico and New Spain's colonizers, who apologize to the Apache, who ran off the Tohono O'odham, who inherited the land and its resources through several cultures that came before, stretching back maybe 14,000 years?
We might use the day to discuss the colonialism of Amazon and Facebook, MacDonald's and Disney.
"Jesus was born in the spring; they moved Christmas to December to neutralize the pagan Solstice celebration."
Incorrect, we have several extant letters from early Church authors debating about when exactly Christ's birthday is. There is an ancient Jewish tradition that prophets died on the same day they were conceived. So, as Jesus died on March 25th, he was assumed to have been born nine months later, December 25th.
"Easter got its name because it neutralized the rites of the spring goddess Eostre." Only in Germanic countries, in the rest of the world it's still called the Paschal Mass or Pascha. So while this might be true, it doesn't follow that "All of our best holidays have begun as anti-holidays to neutralize older rites." The Paschal Mass was celebrated centuries before the Christianisation of Germany.
Great post!
So what? Who cares?
This post showed me some holes in my map of US culture outside the little CA slice I was raised in.
The idea that anyone cared much about Columbus day (aside from culture war objections to Indigenous Peoples day) is pretty new to me, I'm going to look further into the history of it later. I didn't even associate him strongly with Italy....
The framing of Indigenous Peoples as a holiday celebrating those cultures seems a little off. In my experience (19 y/o going to public but extra blue tribed schools) it was always more of a solemn remembering-a-genocide situation. Plus, as a kid even in elementary on Columbus day (it hadn't been renamed yet) we just learned a little about how colonialism sucked. Whatever it's called, to me it's always been a day where we get talked to about colonialism sucking, then we get a three-day weekend. I don't think it matters much what it's called, federally. My college is giving me IP's day off, my HS always listed it as IP's day, to the point I was mildly surprised to learn that the government listed it as Columbus day.
I propose: "National history is complicated day" Where we can have discussions like this one and more and instill in our children the vital concept that the past is a foreign country! It could have fun rituals like everyone taking turns lionizing some historical figure and then someone else can read off a script why that figure was a moral monster in favor of some other figure and the next person in line can then read off a script tearing down that figure and so on and so on.
Norman Borlaug day for the win! I think I’m going to start celebrating a few of these alternate holidays in my family. Imagine how much better our society would be if people associated actually excellent historical figures with cake and parties and spending time with family.
I celebrate the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo and all the US veterans who faught in a war that ended with the nation nearly doubling its territorial footprint. And because of those men, I was born in that area as a free American.
This post made me happier than most ACT posts in recent memory. Thank you.
Object level: I never liked Columbus Day, and the a-historicity of Chicago's Elementary School encomia to Columbus gave me the creeps a decade before I read Orson Scott Card's Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus (which is a surprisingly deep and interesting story about the power of charismatic people to affect history in random directions).
Spoiler: this novel did not redeem Cristóbal Colón in my eyes, but it did get me thinking about the holiday in pretty similar ways to how Scott is discussing them, here.
I wrote a Petrov day ceremony booklet (http://petrovday.com/), and unironically support meritocratically allocating holidays to people who deserve it.
That said, I don't think Henrietta Lacks deserves a holiday. Not because cancer research isn't important. Nor because I think giving a cell culture is insufficiently virtuous. Rather, I think Henrietta Lacks should not be honored because I hold a grudge against HeLa, the microorganism that descends from her cancer. It is most famous not for its positive contributions to cancer research, but for invading and ruining cancer research on other cell lines. I don't think this kind of Petri-dish-invasion imperialism should be celebrated!
in related/unrelated news, in my state here kids had a day off last week for Yom Kippur. Jews are a small single digit % of the population here, smaller than several other communities. Other than political clout it bewilders me why that day should be made a holiday for everyone. Also what happens when every other community starts demanding the same for their holidays.
>Maybe if I believed that we could create an even better explorer holiday - one honoring Neil Armstrong, maybe - I could be convinced to part with Columbus Day
You know what? Let's do it. The rationalist community already has Stanislav Petrov Day and Smallpox Eradication Day, let's make July 20th Neil Armstrong Day. Who cares if it didn't affect us directly? You already made the case that the myth is more important than the facts. The moon landing is such a defining, myth-making moment of progress that people to this day say "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we...?" as a way to express their disappointment with human progress. It's the day we celebrate humanity's aspiration to always travel farther and faster, to explore the unknown. And we can celebrate it with a guy who really did set foot on untouched land, rather than a guy who planted flags on someone else's land and pretended it was untouched.
>I’m sorry, you may be right about the history, but Indigenous Peoples’ Day is just not a very good holiday. Indigenous Peoples are just too vague and diverse to have any real attachment to them.
Take a page from The Oatmeal and celebrate Bartolome de las Casas, a contemporary of Columbus who fought for the rights of the natives: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day
Think it should be fine for Whites to celebrate Columbus Day for their ancestors conquering this beautiful land and for Native Americans to observe Indigenous Day to lament their ancestors losing it. It used to happen in ancient times. The day some empire conquered some major city would be a feast day while the inhabitants of that city might observe it as day of mourning.
I honestly never knew about the New Orleans pogrom in 1892, and definitely would have never guessed that the largest lynching in American history was directed at Italians. I feel like that’s some important context that is completely ignored in the conversation around Columbus Day.
I encourage everyone to do the minimal amount of work necessary to prove this false:
"Indigenous Peoples’ Day is observed by feeling vaguely guilty, making a big show of not celebrating Columbus Day, and making sure not to do anything fun or cultural related to Indigenous Peoples in any way, lest it offend someone."
Most populated areas have interesting cultural events for this holiday. Don't be a lazy bitch like Beroe, go do or see something cool.
Just call them all National Holidays. There's one a month in Canada, which seems like a good number. I think they call them Bank Holidays.
I wonder whether Columbus Day is the only reason everyone learns about Columbus. The Americas we care about started in 1620. Columbus seems a lot like *South* American history, which is like a single unit in high school otherwise.
I think Beroe may be wrong about us being incapable of creating good holidays anymore. First, Pride celebrations seem pretty fun, genuine, and widespread despite being superficially similar to the example of Heritage Celebration Month. Secondly, Juneteenth isn’t entirely new but is new federally and at least is a pretty great, singular event to mythologize and celebrate. I don’t really know what to do for it yet, but it seems like the right foundation that’s not generic and is heroic. Lastly, we’re importing some of the greatest holidays from elsewhere like Holi that have awesome celebrations. So I’m quite optimistic that future holidays will be at least as awesome as Columbus Day and maybe something will come along that can topple the greatest American holiday, Halloween.
I think it’s a missed opportunity for us to have holidays dedicated to Fear and to Love but none to other emotions. What about a Social Awkwardness day? You could go to “haunted” houses that contain people trying to make small talk with you about sports you don’t follow. I imagine Guilt could be covered well by existing holidays, maybe combining Earth Day with Lent? Pride has been taken already, so sadly we won’t really get a holiday about self aggrandizement. Loneliness gets smuggled into Valentine’s Day or really any major holiday when you’re alone - but maybe we need to find a way to celebrate it for those that aren’t already lonely, just as Halloween creates fright in those not generally afraid. An Uncertainty day would probably be popular to the rationalist community. How about a Lost in an Unfamiliar Place day? Celebrate by going to a new city and turning off your GPS and asking strangers for directions. Actually that one sounds like a great idea with growing importance.
This was fun. Thanks. It's kinda sad that the celebration of Italian culture in America has Columbus attached to it. Dyngus day and St. Patrick's day are better in that regard. The great thing about Dyngus day and St. Paddy's (here in Buffalo NY) is that on those days everyone (who wants to be) is Polish or Irish and can join the party. All ethnic celebrations should be like that. (The 'cultural appropriation' stuff just seems silly to me.)
On a side note is there anyone saying that holding our heroes of the past to todays standards is also silly. I think it's a much better to use these 'apparent human failures' ( I sat for 5 minutes trying to find the right words here... no luck) as a window into the mindset/ culture of the past. (I do like the image of the mythical Columbus, thanks for that.) We are all sinners, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't love each other.
I don't know what my reaction was *supposed* to be, but I felt like I was agreeing with Beroe for most of the exchange?
This was awesome. More dialectical posts like this please.
1. We should have 24 federal holidays: two per month. (Work is overrated.)
2. Presidents Day - why? Do we have a legislators day or judges day.
3. The Day of the Unknown Immigrant in lieu of Columbus Day.
4. The Day of the Unknown Native American in addition to 3.
5. MLK Day. Sigh, we should celebrate non-violent protest, we should celebrate civil rights, we should remember all victims of violence. But should we engage in secular hagiography?
6. Holidays are holy days. But what things are really "holy" in a secular state. What are the "symbols" that are important? What things are worth teaching via the symbol of a holiday.
Political
First Amendment Day
Executive Day
Legislative Day
Judicial Day
Constitution Day
Jury Day
Presumption of Innocence Day
Due Process Day
?
Sociological
Immigration, aboriginals, the abolition of slavery, pluralism, equality, solidarity, work, leisure, safety, the prevention of injury and death,?
Personal
Sacrifices of military, sacrifices of heroes, mothers, fathers, children, ?
If we're looking to replace Columbus Day with a celebration of someone associated with the European exploration and colonization of the Americas, then it might make sense to narrow it down slightly to *English/British* exploration and colonization, since that's more America-specific and it sidesteps the problem of Columbus being clearly the most significant foundational figure for overall European exploration.
The main names that leaps to mind off the top of my head are Walter Raleigh, John Cabot, Myles Standish, John Smith, and William Penn. Plus natives who had substantial roles in peaceful collaboration with early English colonists: Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Squanto. Off the bat, I'd eliminate Squanto and Standish since they're redundant with Thanksgiving, and then eliminate Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Smith since their story requires even more whitewashing and mythologizing than Thanksgiving.
Of the remaining people, Raleigh wins the established name recognition test by a large margin, while Penn is probably the most personally laudable of the three (Raleigh being a convicted pirate and war criminal, and Cabot being something of a blank slate due to paucity of contemporary accounts of his life and voyages). Cabot has the advantage of being a suitable hero-figure for Italian Americans in lieu of Columbus, as Cabot was an Italian mariner (probably born in either Naples or Genoa, and later became a naturalized Venetian citizen) who took service as an explorer for Henry VII.
I think some of the specific "anti-holiday" claims you've made surrounding Christmas and Easter are refuted in the Atheist History Blog.
Bravo! This was pretty interesting. A lot of unexpected arguments on both sides.
There were a few bits that annoyed me though, like when Beroe says "At least we got a real historical figure who we can have feelings about.", even though her position is that Columbus Day is not celebrating a real historical figure in the first place.
Incidentally, while reading this, I imagined two guys having the argument even though both characters were given female names. I wonder what that says about me.
Alternative "logical" way to decide what holidays to have: never mind what people did in the past, who do we *want* to celebrate now? You could have a big vote using something clever like Condorcet voting to try to avoid anything that too many people hate, and get a list that empirically reflects our current desires.
Of course, in Britain we'd end up with a Boaty McBoatface Day, but that's just what you have to live with.
1. I would think a graph of numbers of Nobel Prize winners in the physical sciences per country does count as observational evidence! Crude, to be sure, but then what wouldn't be.
2. There is (in my book) a real tendency that shows up in the revolutionary calendar, the decimalisation of everything (including the proportion of students to be admitted to École Polytechnique and École Normale - btw, see https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2016.20757), Auguste Comte (who, incidentally, was Coria in the dialogue), etc., it is
(a) a tendency rooted in the Enlightenment,
(b) not nearly as dominant, ever, as you may make it out to be.
In particular, if you talk to anybody sufficiently familiar with the French research system, and mention Napoleon, you will hear about his creation of Grandes Écoles, not about any supposed allegiance of his to some sort of universal guiding principle.
3. Thanks for the link. Feynman starts out being funny (if a bit overly simplistic) and then shows unfamiliarity with how many mathematicians work. Of course mathematicians are guided by intuition, special cases, etc. If a difference is to be made, it is that they get to choose what those special cases are, rather than having them dictated by (previous understandings of) physical reality.
Does Borlaug Day exist? I would actually be really happy to celebrate that one, his story excites me
The part about holidays being created to counter other holidays is questionable. Putting Christmas on December 25th, for example, might have had more to do astronomically with the winter solstice, or it might have been drawn from the belief that Jesus was both crucified and conceived on March 25th. Another theory, which is somewhat ironic if I'm using the word right, is that the date of Christmas was originally taken directly from Hanukkah.
Andraste presents it as fact that Jesus was actually born in the spring, but I don't know if there's conclusive proof of that. I think the date is a matter of both theological and historical/archaeological controversy.
It's possible that he's correct (that is, that Jesus was born in the spring, and his birthday party was moved to December to screw over the Pagans) but I'd consider it to be one valid theory among many, or perhaps one contributing cause among several, rather than the sole proven cause.
(On the actual subject of the post, briefly: I think the concept of a holiday to remember defeated or forgotten peoples is cool. Aztecs and their victims, or for other continents, maybe ancient Carthage, the Greco-Bactrians, the Tocharians, and so on. I find the politics behind Indigenous Peoples Day tiresome, but I can see some genuine appeal in the concept.)
Apparently NYC now acknowledges the day as both Indigenous People's Day and Italian Heritage Day: https://portal.311.nyc.gov/article/?kanumber=KA-03240. I support this
I apologise, but as a non-American this entire debate is so insanely weird. Inventing a culture (which is essentially what is going on here) by committee, Socratic dialogue, or by using analytics or focus groups is farcical.
FWIW, there doesn't need to be a link between what is a "government mandated extra day off" and a cultural event. In the UK, the later 20th century saw a reorganisation of the "bank holidays" to fall more evenly. That's why we have "late May bank holiday" and "August Bank Holiday" which have no symbolism attached to them. I don't see why Columbus Day couldn't just be designated October Public Holiday and you can do what you like on the day...
I think the explanation is that "it was believed in ancient times" (I've never found evidence of this) (I also haven't looked for evidence) that great men died on the date of their conception. To be born in late December, Jesus would've been conceived in late March.
If people really are fretting about "What can I do for Indigenous People's Day?", consider donating to the Navajo & Hopi Resiliency Fund:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/nhresiliency
It grew out of their work doing fundraising and volunteer efforts during Covid.
If I hypothetically construe the word "millionaire" as referring to any representative of the set of all glasses-wearing persons, would it be a sensible statement to say that I am a millionaire?
No. Sense is not built atop nonsense.
To answer the complaining question "What should people even do on indigenous people day", it seems as obvious as it seems fated that it will not be widely done: actually visit a local indigenous people cultural center of some kind, or otherwise spend time learning about your local indigenous people, their history, and their current biggest problems.
When Czechoslovakia was created after WW1, the left held the position that religion and the church was a relic of Austria-Hungary. So a group of members of parliament proposed a law to cancel all religious holidays and enact new "national" holidays (May 1, July 6, October 28, the greatly reduced number of holidays should have been compensated by a paid vacation of one week/year). Unsurprisingly, the proposal did not succeed.