Family history festivals

We finished reading Sylvia & Aki together the other day, which has been providing us with plenty to discuss during our social studies time (it's about two girls whose lives intersect in WWII: Aki is sent to a Japanese internment camp and Sylvia's family rents Aki's home and farm while they are away (and fights against segregation in California schools—the Mendez vs. Westminster case); there's seriously so much to digest in this book).

Unfortunately we don't have our new read-aloud book in our hands yet, so today we learned about Día de Muertos and Obon, as well as the history of our own Halloween holiday. I got a little teary as we watched little videos on YouTube, wishing we had a similar thing in our culture. I think, perhaps, the very root of Halloween is that sort of thing—the sort of thing where you acknowledge loss and remember about those you're missing and wish them well—but it's been buried by candy and spooks and general forgetfulness. It simply isn't a meaningful holiday anymore.

But I wish that it was.

I wish that we could build a boat in tribute to our lost loved one(s) to parade down the street. I wish we could bang on drums and gongs and set off firecrackers and yell their name out to sea. I wish we could say, "Hey, everyone! Here is who we've loved and lost! It's been really hard!" And I wish that our community would bang drums and set off firecrackers and say, "We know it's hard. We've lost someone, too. We're here for each other!"

I just think it's a beautiful thing that's missing from our society. Of course we mourn together at funerals and things, but we don't have a holiday with time set aside to acknowledge each other's pain, to remember our family (both here and beyond), and to celebrate life and, ultimately, death.


We have Memorial Day and Veteran's Day, but those holidays both don't quite do it for me since they're technically military holidays. We have Remembrance Day in Canada (same day as Veteran's Day) but, again, that's specifically to recall the horrors of war, not a time for family and community to gather and celebrate their family.

We have Family Day up in Canada, but that's just family time that coincides with President's Day in the States (why? to keep us on the same fiscal calendar?).

We have Christmas and Thanksgiving and all sorts of holidays, but they don't have the focus that I'm looking for.

What I want, I guess, is, like, a family history holiday.

Would that be weird? Like, where we can build ofrendas and display things our ancestors loved, where we can write their names on sticks and burn them on a bon fire (which has no linguistic ties to the English bonfire), or where we have time off to gather for family reunions and discuss our family history and enjoy each other (Obon is a time for family reunions, we learned) without having other traditions (like turkeys or bauble-bangled Christmas trees or Easter bunnies or trick-or-treating) getting in the way.

And maybe we don't need that. Maybe we just need to focus our attention on such things without setting aside a special day—very Puritan of us.

In a way, I suppose we do. Family history work is pretty important in our religion—temple work and family history work are sacredly linked—but I just wish there was more of a community feel to it. I really enjoyed watching the clips that we did about these two festivals and the communal expressions of grief and celebration. It was truly beautiful. And I'm aching for something like that right now specifically because grief in our culture is meant to be kept quiet and we're entering the anniversary of a very difficult week in our lives.

But that's okay. We'll make it through it.

Consider this my act of building a boat and parading it through the street.

Also, I kind of want to re-watch both Coco and Kubo and the Two Strings with my kids now (though a large part of my brain is screaming, "That's too much television!" especially considering how I let them watch Ichabod Crane and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow this afternoon).