Do you like to party?
My conversion to the vital art of celebration.
Years ago, a colleague of mine threw himself a farewell party. There was going to be dancing, which wasn’t really my thing, but I thought hey it’s a farewell so I should make an appearance. As this colleague was from overseas, I assumed he was returning home.
It turned out he would be away for two months. As in he was going on holidays.
I felt cheated, to say the least. I had gone to some effort to attend an event I wasn’t expecting to enjoy a whole lot. I’d even put myself out there a bit to bring a date – a guy I’d been out with a couple of times, who did enjoy dancing.
Basically it seemed a bit rich of my colleague to get his friends and acquaintances together to celebrate … what exactly?
Not a party pooper, but party neutral
Celebrations didn’t figure prominently in my nature or in my upbringing.
For a long time, something about celebrations felt foreign to me. I liked food, cheering and fun times with friends as much as the next person but did we really need to manufacture an excuse to gather with friends? I even struggled to connect with upbeat worship songs in church because the vibe of praise didn’t resonate emotionally (as much as I understood Jesus being risen was and remains a Very Exciting Thing).
Despite being a churchgoing family, Christmas isn’t a big deal in my family. Growing up, our only traditions were Dad buying my sister and me a set of scratchies and preparing some form of poultry for lunch on 25 December. That was about it. Since his retirement, my immediate family has rarely been in the same country, let alone the same house, on Christmas Day.
I did get birthday parties with friends: simple affairs either at home or at McDonald’s. In a way, we were going through the motions. I’m grateful I wasn’t the kid who didn’t throw birthday parties, but I don’t know that I looked forward to them with any more anticipation than I did a regular sleepover.
It’s little wonder, then, that as I got older I began to see everybody else’s celebrations as an exaggeration. When I looked at the way people around me and around Australia marked New Year’s Eve or Australia Day, I felt a sense of emptiness.
Booze. Barbecues. Banter. It was a lot less like celebration and more like entertainment. Like my colleague and his farewell-for-two-months party, they made a big deal out of very little.1
More creative ways to party
Living in South America expanded my view of celebration.
In my first month in the small country town of Gonzanamá, nestled deep in the Andes, I saw fireworks done in a way I’d never seen before. The council had hired an engineer from across the border in Peru to construct castillos, which literally means ‘castles’ in Spanish. These were structures of wooden scaffolding, complete with wheels and other moving parts. which formed the framework for a flashy fireworks display.
I was told they paid the engineer US$30,000 for the job — a small fortune by anyone’s reckoning.
After the big show, drunk men donned cow-shaped papier mache headpieces with fireworks on them, and danced around as sparks flew. It was the festival of the local patron saint, el Señor del Buen Suceso, and just one of many occasions throughout the year where the whole community gathered together.
This too was less celebration and more entertainment – but at least it was more interesting. Birthdays, too, were made more interesting by the Latino tradition of dunking the birthday person’s face in the cake.
Another celebration I’ll never forget is the way we marked New Year’s Eve in Ecuador. Each of us crafted effigies of ourselves and dressed them in our old clothes. Then, after our bellies were full of food and wine and the clock had struck midnight, we flogged them, burned them and jumped over the flaming ‘corpses’. There’s a slew of out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new symbolism built into this tradition, absent in Australian NYE practices.
(Destroying effigies was, naturally, followed by entertainment: drinking Cantaclaro, or whisky with Guitig, and dancing cumbias and merengues in the streets. Not unlike an Australian NYE, just with inferior booze and superior moves.)
Celebrating to stay sane
My experience of celebration in Bolivia was quite different. Working at International Justice Mission, we provided investigative, legal and social work support for child victims of sexual violence. Our team had the custom of welcoming every arrest, every conviction – every little sliver of a hope of victory – with a rattling of matracas.
Each staff member kept our own wooden instrument at our desks. As soon as we heard someone ringing it, we’d pick up our matraca and start joining in with the noise-making. The grinding clicking sound would echo down the hall, through all the rooms of the apartment unit that served as our office until everybody was wielding their matraca and gathering to hear what had happened.
While it was, on the surface, a frivolous gesture, I saw how crucial this tradition was in an environment where our work brought us into places of real darkness.
The children were very young, some just a few years old. All of them were from poor families. Many of the abusers were fathers, grandfathers, uncles, neighbours.
Cases could take seven years or more, only for the perpetrator to be let off. There were many times where a victim’s family would be too tired to continue – or bribed or intimidated by the abuser’s family into dropping the case.
It was hard work: hard on our time, on our hearts, on our spirits. The licence to celebrate kept us going.
I think this is when I realised celebration and entertainment were different things. What I struggled to value was entertainment. What I needed to value more was celebration.
Making meaning
According to Richard Foster, celebration is not just good, it’s spiritual. It’s one of his 12 spiritual disciplines: the culmination of meditation, prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship and guidance. He writes:
Joy is the end result of the Spiritual Disciplines’ functioning in our lives. God brings about the transformation of our lives through the Disciplines, and we will not know genuine joy until there is a transforming work within us.
A few years ago I read Romance Behind Judaica by Faydra Shapiro, a book about Jewish holy days. I loved seeing how the traditions blend fun and humour with symbolism, storytelling and community. And all of it orients participants towards God, remembering his past goodness and living in hope of the fulfilment of his promises for the future.
While celebration is more than throwing a party, the external party stokes the internal spirit of celebration in each of us. It’s less about manufacturing artificial experiences of joy and more about cultivating a spirit that knows how to recognise and express joy.
In Bolivia I experienced how celebration validates and affirms the effort invested in a worthwhile cause. It acknowledges the difficulties and challenges we face. It’s a way to channel blood, sweat and tears – and often not a few negative emotions that were part of the journey – into a positive, joyful display.
Celebration is a show of support and an expression of community – we typically celebrate with others. That was as true of my childhood birthday parties as it was of NYE in Ecuador and the matraca in Bolivia. In Foster’s book, celebration is one of the corporate disciplines as opposed to one we observe on our own.
Why we need to celebrate more than ever
And what we celebrate, if you ask (agnostic) Ethan Hawke, tells the next generation a lot about what we value. What does it mean that we celebrate a wedding, a birth, a birthday? Christmas? Australia Day (and on which date)? Valentine's Day? That at Easter we hide chocolate eggs throughout the house and garden for kids to hunt?
Conversely, what does it mean that rites of passage have all but disappeared from contemporary society? In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt argues that, combined with the advent of smartphone use among preteens and teens, this loss is seriously messing with young people’s transition to becoming mature and resilient adults:
our extremely new secular societies may be losing something important as we abandon public and communally marked rites of passage. A human child doesn’t morph into a culturally functional adult solely through biological maturation …
Western societies have eliminated many rites of passage, and the digital world that opened up in the 1990s eventually buried most milestones and obscured the path the adulthood.
In an increasingly secular and fragmented society, where we’re more overwhelmed, polarised and isolated than ever, celebration has the capacity to help us create both shared meaning and meaningful community.
Learning to celebrate
I started drafting this piece in 2016, under the working title of Learning to celebrate. It’s interesting looking back at the original framing and realising that perhaps I have learned to celebrate – or at least learned and embraced its value, even if my execution is still wanting.
When I got married on the first day of the second Sydney lockdown, I was more than a little devo that the pandemic postponed our reception and meant only immediate family members could physically witness me exchanging vows with my husband. I wanted my broader family and friends to be in the church to share in our joy.
Last year I decided the nonprofit I work for would run a lunch event not for donors or to raise money, but to celebrate with the refugees we helped get protection for, and the partners who collaborated with us. Celebration rather than fundraising or advocacy was the purpose. We did it again this year and I was a little devo that I was sick and missed it.
Understanding the difference between celebration and entertainment.
Witnessing the energising, healing power of celebration.
These two things taught me to appreciate the need to celebrate.
The end of June marked my wedding anniversary, work anniversary and mum’s birthday over three consecutive days. We didn’t celebrate any of them – and I felt a sadness about that. We missed something in not pausing to recognise and relish those milestones.
The little things are worth celebrating, too.
Recently my sister sent me the cutest video of her two-year-old performing a double fist pump and a victory lap of their living room. The reason? He had successfully stacked a tower of red blocks.
No-one had taught him to celebrate that way (adults generally celebrated his achievements by clapping their hands) and he wouldn’t have seen it on Bluey or any other kids program. It must have been an innate reaction, a primally coded celebratory reflex.
I don’t know if I lost this reflex to teenaged cynicism and loneliness, but I’m glad to have rediscovered the power and the beauty of celebration.
with joy,
suansita k.
Header image: Hedi Alija.
For more on celebration as a spiritual discipline, see this excerpt from Richard Foster’s book.
For more on the erosion of rites of passage in contemporary society, read this article from Stephen Mintz.
If you liked this, you might want to read …
🎇 NYE lessons from Ecuador, where I describe in more detail the tradition mentioned above.
💒 How to plan a COVID wedding, where I share about how the pandemic hijacked my wedding day.
Curated by me
In case you missed it, here’s my previous post:
In continuing to wrestle with the ethics around AI, I can recommend:
🎵 Stepfanie Tyler wrote the lyrics and melodies and used AI to produce a whole album of her songs:
I’m curious about exploring the tech too, if it can help me produce the songs I have in my head but don’t quite have the guitar and piano ability to record.
🫀Apparently AI demonstrates better – and more consistent – emotional intelligence than humans.
💬 A psychotherapist has some deep, extensive conversations with Claude and finds it can mimic self-awareness, including the kind of breakthrough moments his patients might have in sessions with him.
I should say there’s a little more meaning around ANZAC Day than other public holidays in Australia. But the truth is I have never attended a dawn service and it’s not a day any of my friendship circles commemorate.
So important to celebrate even the small things. Putting the bins out on time, eating a decent meal, all of that 👌