Holiday

12 Qudrat 163 B.E. - November 15, 2006

The word holiday has an interesting history. According to dictionary.com the word itself comes from the Middle English word holidai, which meant Holy Day. Dictionary.com also gave the Old English word h lig dæg, which also means Holy Day and the origin of holiday. There were several different definitions for the word, but I’m not going to go into those here.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that the origin of the word is Holy Day, which refers to a day of sacredness, of feasting, celebrating and prayer. In today’s world we don’t often think of the origin of the word holiday, much less the origins of the holidays we take a day off work to celebrate or commemorate or to give gifts. All holidays seem to be for today is spend money to buy things and give to people who could probably use the money themselves rather than the objects. More than likely the people, we give the gifts to would rather have the person giving the gift in their life more often than the gift.

The thing about holiday shopping is that most of the time we go overboard and spend too much. Sometimes we ask the person what they want for the holiday and sometimes we don’t ask. When we don’t ask for gift suggestions from the person, we get what we think the person would like rather than what that person really wants. Even when we do ask and get the gift the person wanted, we presume that was what the person really wanted.

Then there are the gift-exchange holiday parties. We buy the gift in or out of the proper price range without giving the gift itself any thought.

I think what I’m getting at is that when we buy gifts, we never really give it a lot of thought. We just buy something that seems appropriate.