Some eyebrows shot skyward earlier this week when the White House released photos of President Obama lighting all the candles on a menorah at the first family’s Hanukkah party. The candles are meant to be lit one at a time over eight days, in a nightly dramatization of the 2nd century miracle in which a tiny pool of oil kept burning long after it should have run out. It is, my friend Mona Charen points out, a ritual act with ritual rules. Yet there all eight tapers were, blazing away 11 days before the Jewish holiday itself.
That the White House had an early Hanukkah bash is no scandal. After all, no one thinks it wrong or odd to have a Christmas party in early December — or to attend Christmas parties throughout the month. And, as the president remarked, in an apparently off-script moment, “We never need an excuse for a good party.”
But lighting all the candles so far ahead of time seems frankly odd. It’s like opening all the windows on an Advent calendar at once, weeks before Christmas — or holding a Christmas Mass on the 10th, rather than on December 25th. The whole point of an Advent calendar, and of the candles on a menorah, is to mark time, in real time, one day at a time. Both, while decorative (and in the case of Advent calendars, often containing sweets), represent something profound. Neither is something to be rushed through and its unseemly when they are.
It is perhaps a sign of our personal-gratification-uber-alles times that holidays seem increasingly fungible. I wonder whether it’s not something we’ll eventually regret, given that once traditions begin to slip there’s often not much that keeps holding them in place. Obama apparently held the Hanukkah party early so that he and his family could take a vacation to Hawaii. Thanksgiving no longer holds the place it did. This year the taboo was broken against big-box and department stores opening on the third Thursday in November. We can expect to see opening times creep ever earlier. In 2011, Toys R U opened at 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving. Next year, I bet it’ll be 7 p.m. — or 5 p.m. — and you know other retailers will be doing the same.
Celebrating holidays other than on the actual day oughtn’t be some sort of prison, of course. Military families often stretch or compress the calendar to fit a loved one’s deployments. The Queen of England has a real birthday, which like everyone’s is fixed, and an official birthday, which varies in the countries in the British Commonwealth according to when the spring weather tends to be nicest.
Some dates seem impervious. You may have a barbecue on July 3rd, if you can’t, but it can’t be a 4th of July celebration. And though you may wish to stay up until midnight swilling champagne and kissing everyone in sight, only on the night of December 31st will it mark celebrate New Year’s Eve.
A friend of mine remembers chafing as a girl at the fact that her birthday is Dec. 26. Her friends enviously assumed she’d get twice as many holiday gifts, but she says she never seemed to get more than her siblings, who got presents at their summertime birthdays.
It seemed a huge injustice. When she turned 8, she announced that she had decided in future to celebrate her half-birthday in June. One day in June, she announced that it was her half-birthday. And on that day, her mother and sister gave her … half a gift. It was a rebuke she remembers: Certain feasts are not, apparently, moveable.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
