Recently I was in Charlotte during a holiday and found no libraries were open where I could work on my PowerPoint for class. After 90 minutes in a third-place coffee shop, I worked for the rest of the day in my hotel room. The holiday, according to the U.S. Government, is called Columbus Day, but is also called by some Indigenous Peoples’ Day[1] for the purpose of recognizing and remembering the indigenous populations which were decimated by disease and war with the coming of the Europeans.

As we move toward the upcoming holiday season, it is a good time to consider how we should respond to the many holidays and months of remembrance that are part of our larger society in the United States. And what about the Church calendar? It is very different from our national holidays, though there is some significant overlap. We could spend a lifetime trying to remember all the holidays for celebration and remembrance; some days and months are for remembering something joyful (Epiphany), and others are for remembering suffering (Good Friday).

Then there is the confusion over the changing expression of holidays, often introduced because of contexts and greed. For example, All Saints Day and All Hallowed Eve have become Halloween, now including a parade of deathly figures on our neighbors’ lawns. How in the world did that happen?

St. Patrick’s Day has become a day of parades and green beer.

Christmas (Christ Mass), celebrating the humility of God’s coming to us via a stable, has become the most materialistic and consumeristic time of the year. “What do you want for Christmas, Tommy?”

Again, as Christians, we ought to ask ourselves: how do we think about holidays—that is, holy days? I suggest we think about them carefully, historically, and biblically—and not to allow the larger culture to shape us by common public practices. For holidays give us rhythms and patterns for life. Some holidays loom large in our lives, while others gently remind us of something or someone in history. Certainly, this is true for the Thanksgiving holiday, which lasts from Wednesday before the actual day (the busiest travel day of the year) through the Sunday evening after Thanksgiving.

I would call for pastors, influencers, and parents to be intentional about lifting up, talking about, and teaching children well about the meaning of “holy days.” In the early church, Epiphany was the most celebrated holy day of the year. Celebrating this holy day basically communicates, “God has appeared among us!” For the Orthodox, salvation comes with the incarnation and then, by extension, in the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. But first God appeared to humanity. Let’s celebrate!

Let’s lift up All Saints Day and de-emphasize Halloween. Let’s talk about the saints who are our forerunners of the faith—St. Francis and how he is a model of faithfulness, and (for Protestants) the great missionaries and martyrs, Jim Elliot, Hudson Taylor, and Mother Teresa.

And then there are the celebration and remembrance months that focus on race and ethnicity: Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian American and Pacific Islander Month, and Native American Heritage Month. As a seminary president of a global evangelical seminary community, we use these special months as a reminder of our fundamental mission and vision for all we do and teach. At Gordon-Conwell we have a vision statement that is much more sacred than American holidays. It is a statement that intertwines all expressions of God’s grace as a reconciling love to embody “many languages, one Lamb, and no tears.”[2] Diverse cultures, languages, and races reflect God’s glory. We don’t need official national holidays to remind us of our missional aspirations, but they can reinforce what we believe.

Holidays, for Christians, should be “Holy Days.” We see them as sacred reminders, or signposts, throughout the year. They represent a time to confess, celebrate, remember, and learn more about who we are as Christians dedicated to honoring Jesus Christ who was incarnate in a particular culture and time. To the degree that a holiday can be expressed as a holy day, we can give thanks and embrace its observance.

Thanksgiving is a great example of an American holiday that can and should be a holy day for Christians and their churches. The same with St. Patrick’s Day (for Patrick was a missionary), All Saints Day, and even St. Valentine’s Day.

Let’s use holidays to point to holy days.

[1] While not an official federal holiday, Indigenous Peoples’ Day was proclaimed by President Joe Biden in 2021.
[2] From Revelation 7.

Dr. Scott W. Sunquist, president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, is author of the “Attentiveness” blog. He welcomes comments, responses, and good ideas.