You see, since time immemorial, we humans have seemingly always hungered for ritual. It’s a cornerstone feature of nearly all human social existence. It’s woven into our DNA and our social fabric.
And whereas rituals and ceremony in the past may have looked like garlanding a maypole or burying the dead with food, weapons, and wealth for the afterlife, today our particular Fall and Winter holiday rituals may look like some hybrid of flying home for a turkey dinner, late night services at Church, and Christmas morning present opening.
All of this is well and good, but there can be a double bind come the holiday time particularly for those of us who may or may not want to partake in our family of origin holidays, who are far apart from our families, and/or who don’t have families with time-honored rituals that we even know how to carry on.
Some of us – perhaps not all – who find ourselves in any of these situations may still hunger for ritual and ceremony and yet feel compelled to keep up the ones we grew up with, feel guilty somehow for the impulse to create new rituals apart from those of our family, or feel lost and not know how to begin to craft them!
If this is you, if you’re feeling ceremony-hungry and seeking inspiration about how you, as an adult, may want to craft some either for yourself or your own young family, keep reading for some ideas of how to do this and also about the psychological benefit that ceremony and ritual can give us.
The psychological importance of ceremony and ritual.
“This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don’t have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn’t have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert
For the purpose of this article, I’m defining it as anything repetitive, intentional, and meaningful for a variety of life scenarios.
Rituals and ceremony have a wide array of social and psychological benefits: they can help create meaning for us; they help us feel a sense of belonging and connection – to each other, to a higher power, to an arc in the calendar of time; they can ground us; they can elevate us; they can soothe us and can, I believe, even help alleviate anxiety and depression by giving us something we can count on, something to look forward to, something that feeds our soul and spirit in a way that little else can.
