Take a Holiday Today

by Mike Mulvihill

PHOTO:  Madonna dei Tramonti (a 1330 Madonna fresco by the Italian artist Pietro Lorenzetti located in the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi.) 

Today is one of my favorite holidays of the year – the feast of the Immaculate Conception.  Holiday, really?  Sure it is.  But unless you are Catholic (and even if you are), you may not know much about it.

 Growing up in Catholic school land, all it meant was a surprise trip to church as December 8 is a Holy Day, a day of obligation when Catholics are required to attend mass.  Later, when I attended a Catholic college, it was a happier surprise – a day of no classes.  Later I found it was also a bank holiday in Italy.  And, it coincides with Mother’s Day in Panama, which is kind of strange when you drill down to what the Catholic church says this day is all about.

 The Feast of the Immaculate Conception is widely misunderstand to be a celebration of Jesus’ conception (until you try to do the math on how December 25^th ended up being his birthday), but it really is a celebration of the Virgin Mary being conceived immaculately in her mother’s womb – without the stain of original sin. In this manner, she was prepared to be the “vessel” for bringing Jesus into the world. (That is a tough standard for those Panamanian moms to live up to!)

Regardless, I always found its proximity to Christmas a helpful reminder to me that Christmas is indeed a religious Holiday and not the culmination of our Black Friday and Cyber Monday efforts (which, by the way, were shimmering glints of economic optimism). And, it also reminds us, as one of my favorite non-traditional Christmas songs says, “Christmas spirit is not what you drink.”

Whatever your catalyst may be, it’s time to get in the Christmas spirit. Not just shopping or parties or getting those Holiday cards and tweets out there.  But the real spirit of kindness toward others, of giving rather than receiving and making our own little world a better place to live and play. Scrooge himself found after his visits from those three ghosts that  he actually liked life!   May you like your life this Holiday Season.