When is Celebration Appropriation?

I have never celebrated the holidays, partially for religious reasons but also because I have no cultural connection to them. I feel uncomfortable as someone who still considers myself to be Christian. Participating in celebrations that people of various cultures all over the world were wholesale slaughtered over across time and the face of the earth for is not an option for me. Their indigenous customs were labeled a crime while simultaneously being deconstructed and reassembled into new celebrations for their conquerors.

Dictionary.com defines Cultural Appropriation as:

Almost every mainstream holiday (celebrated in America) was systematically Christianized in an attempt to convert “pagans.” Once those traditions were co-opted, the extermination of said “pagans” who refused to get on board intensified. For the most part, that was, at least hundreds of years ago, true, but the ancestors of those people still bear the memories of these horrifying atrocities.

Holidays that weren’t cannibalized in this way are just propaganda vehicles for lies to cover war crimes and humanitarian crises, at least here in America, where I live. I understand this is not precisely the same everywhere. Again, I would not adopt other cultures’ and religions’ customs and holidays simply because they still closely resemble their original form.

I could write you an entire book on this subject. I could write a book on each holiday. But I will not fill up the article with redundant information you have no doubt read several times over at this point. You know the truth of the matter is Christmas, Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and dozens if not hundreds of other local religious observances were taken and ritualized mostly but not exclusively by the Catholic Church over the course of hundreds of years in some cases multiple times, taking from various cultures to keep colonized groups in their grips, and drive out the “unbelievers.” 

I will not try to stop anyone else from celebrating whatever event they want, and truth be told, for a lot of people, this logic doesn’t apply to them and wouldn’t affect how they do holidays in the least. And I don’t become upset with people handing out holiday greetings or usually become distressed by holiday decor. Usually…

I can’t change the facts, though, and to a lesser or greater degree, many holidays are painful reminders for many. For example, most people in America have decided to call what used to be referred to as Columbus Day— Indigenous People’s Day due to the enslavement and genocide committed on the human societies already spread across the continent when the so-called explorer arrived.

I don’t celebrate Thanksgiving for the same reason. Even if I can’t confirm whether the stories I have been told about my family’s ancestral history are true or not, that doesn’t matter. I don’t care; I don’t need to have blood in the game not to support genocide on any front. For many people who identify with the indigenous people of North America, the Thanksgiving holiday is a day of Mourning, and the day after is Native American Heritage Day, not a day to buy as many inexpensive items you can barely afford. Peace is not simply an absence of war and an illusion of abundance; it is finding a place of healing and equilibrium for everyone.

I like to think other holidays will slowly change over time — being given back to their cultures in some cases, abolished in others, and transformed in others. Some new holidays with no deeply rooted negative societal connotations will spring up.  Maybe I will celebrate those.

K.B. Silver