BOOK REVIEW: Make Holidays Your Own, by Matt Witt
Cancel Thanksgiving? A Progressive Guide for Handling the Holidays
It’s a good thing that labor journalist and author Matt Witt was not running for governor of Wisconsin this year like DSA candidate Francesca Hong. Democratic primary rivals and Republican opposition researchers would have badly distorted the message of Witt’s new book Make Holidays Your Own (Common Ground Press). It encourages creative rethinking of family gatherings and community practices on major holidays.
In their effort to discredit Hong, her foes in both parties created what the New York Timescalled a “social media kerfuffle” over old social media posts dissing Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and Halloween.
The outspoken state legislator and former restaurant owner from Madison lost her August 11 primary despite polling very strongly beforehand. Given the annual sense of foreboding that overtakes millions of Americans when tense family re-unions draw near in late November, Hong’s past call for Thanksgiving to be “cancelled”—because of its connection to “colonialism”—probably had its local fans.
Under fire on the campaign trail, Hong did concede that bringing people together around a table can be “a good thing.” But, according to the Times, she also courted controversy by “questioning the value of Valentine’s Day and Christmas trees.” So not only Wisconsin turkey farmers, but gift card sellers and Christmas tree growers—if sufficiently miffed—might have voted instead for the moderate Democrat from Milwaukee, David Crowley, who won the primary.
And even if Hong had prevailed, according to the Times, she faced the challenge of winning over voters like John Wilson, a 61-year-old pharmacist from Platteville WI, who usually “leans Democratic.” However, when asked whether he favored Hong or U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for governor, Wilson chose the latter because “you have to take people at their word” about serious matters like Thanksgiving.
Tiffany has strong views on holidays too; in 2021, he was one of 14 House members who voted against making Juneteenth Day a federal holiday, which won’t be popular with African-American voters statewide.
Just A Few Days Off
In the future, left-leaning candidates can avoid even momentarily distracting flaps like this by reading Matt Witt’s book—hopefully, before pulling the trigger on Twitter in a moment of pique. The few paid days off that most Americans get to enjoy should not be cancel culture targets, when, as the author argues, they can be celebrated in ways “more historically accurate, meaningful, inclusive and fun.”
In Make Holidays Your Own, Witt offers much creative advice about dealing with that day, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Independence Day and eight others; his focus is on countering their crass commercialization, historical baggage, stultifying traditionalism, or exploitation by the right.
See, for example, the garish 250th birthday party staged on July Fourth of this year in Washington, D.C. by the White House and its corporate funders. While no doubt critical of that, Abdul El-Sayed, the successful Democratic Senate primary winner in Michigan is definitely tiptoeing around the issue of fireworks on the Fourth.
As the Times notes, “he has deleted a number of videos and posts where he floated the idea of abandoning fireworks on Independence Day.” El-Sayed’s press spokesperson is now reminding voters that he “is the former captain of his high school football team, loves Michigan football on Saturdays, and celebrates the Fourth of July with fireworks like the next Michigander.”
In other words, he’s an All-American guy! As Witt explains, “In every culture, holidays matter. They come with a message and symbols— with a story that reinforces a certain way of looking at society and passes on certain values to the next generation.” According to the author, what’s good about remaking holidays, in ways that send a different message, “is that you don’t have to convince everyone in your community who doesn’t agree. They can celebrate however they want and so can you.”
A Labor Day History Lesson
And sometimes the development of alternative celebrations—such as the reclaiming of May Day by the modern day, more immigrant-influenced U.S. labor movement—can lead to two opportunities to picnic, protest, and march, rather than just one!
As a former communications director for the United Mine Workers and Service Employees International Union, the author delves most informatively into the political agenda behind the creation of Labor Day, as a counter to nascent working-class internationalism in the late nineteenth century.
Readers will learn that it was a corporate Democratic President—rather than any anti-union Republican—who first tried to erase the memory of May 1 as an international workers’ holiday born in the U.S.A., and replace it with an end of summer day off out of step with the rest of the world.
Thanksgiving can be a dangerous holiday in various ways.
To add insult to injury, May 1 then got officially rebranded, during the McCarthy era, as Law Day—although nobody, even corporate lawyers, get time off for that. Yet, thanks to multiple MAGA threats to the “rule of law” since Trump got re-elected, more than a thousand California bar members used their lunch hour to stage a first-time ever May Day-style protest in downtown San Francisco.
As Witt recounts, massive demonstrations seeking shorter working hours occurred in Chicago and other U.S. cities on May 1, 1886. When repeated on May Day four years later, workers in “dozens of countries in Europe and Latin America also held rallies and marches to support the eight-hour day demand.”
Thereafter, much to the alarm of “robber barons” here and abroad, May 1 protests became “an annual event for workers all around the world” and an expression of cross-border solidarity between labor radicals of varying stripes.
Forget May Day?
By 1894, however, a business-backed resident of the White House named Grover Cleveland needed a “sop to unions.” He had, after all, just called out federal troops to crush the Pullman strike organized by the American Railway Union, a pioneering alternative to craft unionism led by future Socialist Party presidential candidate Eugene Victor Debs (who was jailed for his role in the strike).
At Cleveland’s request, Congress declared that workers should be given a day off, every year, on the first Monday in September so that, as Witt notes, “actions taken by U.S. unions would not be coordinated with their counterparts in the rest of the world.”
Today, Labor Day is a paid holiday for about 3 in 4 workers in the U.S. Ironically, the lowest paid workers are the least likely to have the day off with pay. That includes non-union workers in food service, retail, hotels, agriculture, delivery and janitorial services, as well as part-time workers, or those whose companies claim are ‘independent contractors’ rather than employees.
On the holiday counter-programming front, the good news is that May Day (as noted above) has made a major come-back over the last two decades. There is also “the shining example of the transformation of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day as now observed in many cities and states.”
Thanks to the efforts of progressive veterans’ groups like Veterans for Peace and Common Defense, at least some commemorative events on Memorial Day and Veterans Day now focus on peace and justice issues, rather than uncritical celebration of past wars.
In his chapter on Martin Luther King Day, the author suggests a range of activities that “can be about the movement and not just the man.” (This is advice that venerators of Cesar Chavez are taking, but only belatedly, after recent revelations about his history of sexual abuse while president of the United Farm Workers.)
Witt reports that all proceeds from his book are going to Rethinking Schools, a
…national nonprofit organization that supports social, economic, and environmental justice teaching at a time when the very idea of public education is under attack. Rethinking Schools’ materials have been used by tens of thousands of educators and have reached millions of students.
Let’s hope that Make Holidays Your Own also gets into the hands of many educators who have to come up with fresh ideas for in-school celebrations of holidays, that cannot be cancelled even in blue states—but of course, don’t want their personal creativity in the classroom (or pet peeves) unleashing a conservative backlash of the sort that did not help Hong.