Paganistan: Notes from the Secret Commonwealth

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Make Election Day a National Holiday

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

Election Day should be a national holiday.

This year, with its hotly-contested Midterm Elections, it certainly seemed like one, moreso than any other Election Day that I can remember. I even got an Election Day card from a friend.

And it's what the ancestors did.

In the Old Days, people from all over Ireland converged in Tara for Samhain. There they did what the Tribe always does when it gets together: they worshiped, feasted, and politicked.

Why is Election Day when it is? For the same reason that Samhain is when it is. The harvest is in, the animals are back from the summer pastures. With the work of the growing season over, there's time to get together to do the necessary work of the People before winter closes in and shuts down travel.

In this sense, I would contend that Election Day is, in effect, a latter-day descendant of Samhain.

There was no Halloween in colonial America. Halloween was a Catholic holiday, and there were few Catholics in early America. But there was Guys Fawkes' Day, the 5th of November, which replaced Halloween in post-Reformation England and inherited many of the older holiday's customs, such as bonfires. After the Revolution, Guy Fawkes' Day became a feria non grata in the United States, but Election Day took its place.

Back when, Election Day even used to be a Bonfire holiday.

Elections lie at the very heart of American values. Elections lie at the heart of any democracy. These are worthy values, and worth celebrating together.

So give people a paid day off work. Shut down the schools. Let's party together for the sake of our shared values. For pagans, let it become yet another part of the Samhain thirtnight.

Make Election Day a national holiday; as Americans, the day and the values that it represents are something that we all share in common. If need be, it can replace some other national holiday which time has rendered irrelevant: some worn-out, tired old holiday, perhaps, which no longer speaks to many Americans and ought to be decommissioned anyway.

Say, maybe, December 25.

 

 

 

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Poet, scholar and storyteller Steven Posch was raised in the hardwood forests of western Pennsylvania by white-tailed deer. (That's the story, anyway.) He emigrated to Paganistan in 1979 and by sheer dint of personality has become one of Lake Country's foremost men-in-black. He is current keeper of the Minnesota Ooser.

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