Going On Holiday

I overheard a conversation this morning:

“I’m going on holiday,” said one.

“Oh, where are you going?” came the reply.

It’s a fairly common conversation isn’t it?  We say we are going on holiday.  Why do we say that?  What is it about our current location that means we must go somewhere for a holiday?

In one sense it’s a little sad.  What has come to pass in our culture that we have to go somewhere else for recreation, relaxation, or pleasure?

It hasn’t always been that way. 

A Holy Day until fairly recently has been a day on which we acknowledged something important in our culture – an anniversary of a momentous event, or a day that contained spiritual significance.

Holy comes to us linguistically from the Old English word halig meaning consecrated.  It pre-dates Christianity and had the sense of “that which must be preserved whole or intact and not violated.”

We have forgotten what is holy in the here and now, and we must leave the here and now and go on holiday.

Vacating Our Place

In the US, the more common term for holiday is vacation.  This word perhaps even more tersely signals the desire to go.  The word gives us a clue – we vacate. 

The root of the word vacation is the Proto-Indo-European word eue meaning to leave, abandon.

What are we abandoning, or going away from? 

Is that what our work ethic, and our institutionalised lives have come to?  That when we celebrate a holiday we must go somewhere else, we must abandon our everyday lives?

The Tourist Fantasy

Going on holiday has now become more and more synonymous with tourism.  We become tourists.

The word tourist entered the English language fairly recently, at the end of the 18th century.  But. my, how we have embraced it.  Tourism has soared.

In 1950 there were approximately 25 million “tourists” world-wide.  Today, every year, the world sees over 1.4 billion tourists.  That’s a 5,600% increase in just 68 years!

One person in every hundred was a tourist in 1950.  Today, one in every 5 is.

Sad, isn’t it?

That we must go somewhere else and abandon our lives in order to find rest, recreation, and/or pleasure.

We have lost the ability to celebrate what is holy in our lives.  We have forgotten how to enjoy our Holy Days.  We have lost connection with our place.