Holidays
Poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, describes his thoughts on holidays in this short poem. We hope you enjoy it, along with a couple of other thoughts on holidays. Some of us do crafts, some of us spend time with family, some of us travel, some of us do nothing, some of us do chores, but, all of us love our holidays. May the words expressed in this short poetry provide reflection for you on the meaning of holidays.Poet: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The holiest of all holidays are those
Kept by ourselves in silence and apart;
The secret anniversaries of the heart,
When the full river of feeling overflows;--
The happy days unclouded to their close;
The sudden joys that out of darkness start
As flames from ashes; swift desires that dart
Like swallows singing down each wind that blows!
White as the gleam of a receding sail,
White as a cloud that floats and fades in air,
White as the whitest lily on a stream,
These tender memories are;--a fairy tale
Of some enchanted land we know not where,
But lovely as a landscape in a dream.
~ ~ ~
Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestion and bustle of cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artifice, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration and monotony -- this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for.
Jean Baudrillard
To many people holidays are not voyages of discovery, but a ritual of reassurance.
Philip Andrew Adams