In Praise of Foolish Holidays

Sociologists are telling us that Americans are drinking less, partying less, and generally turning into beige furniture. A recent Gallup poll states that only 54% of U.S. adults say they drink alcohol, marking the lowest rate since tracking began in 1939. Meanwhile, nearly half (49%) of American adults actively report trying to cut back on their alcohol consumption in 2025 - a striking increase from just two years ago. For all of us here at Anyhigh - whose raison d’etre is to champion all kinds of “highs” - this sober retreat is downright…well, sobering.

There was a time when people knew how to throw a holiday. Not the kind delivered shrink-wrapped alongside themed napkins and a meticulously curated Spotify playlist. No, we’re talking about the real holidays - the ones powered by a parish calendar, a barrel of ale, and the simple willingness to make an utter fool of oneself in public. Entire villages ground to a halt in honor of saints whose names barely rolled off the tongue - and often the resulting celebrations were equal parts reverence and riot.

Today, our calendars are strewn with observances so antiseptic you could eat off them: International Day of Literacy. World Plumbing Day. Attempt to get drunk for the United Nations’ International Day of Forests and you’ll discover how hard it is to summon genuine enthusiasm for occasions designed more for corporate branding than communal bliss. Somewhere along the way, we swapped bonfires and donkey ears for hashtags and ribbon-cuttings.

Even our marquee feasts have been neutered. Christmas? Now less Saturnalia than Amazon Prime logistics. Halloween? A corporate cosplay exercise, with adults paying to play vampire. Thanksgiving? It’s metastasized into the Friday where people beat each other to death for the best deals. The original mischief has been meticulously edited out, leaving us with holidays that resemble photocopies of photocopies - faint, gray, and uncomfortably joyless.

Which is why, we here at Anyhigh are proposing something sorta radical: bring back the real holidays - the ones with names that sound like inside jokes, that involved smashing pitchers, slapping strangers with goat hides, or skipping work just because Monday existed. We once had an embarrassment of feast days, fools’ days, holy days, and excuses to dance around drunk in oak leaves. It would be nothing short of criminal not to unearth them, dust them off, and see how they might help a modern America rediscover what it means to just chill out.

Gŵyl Mabsant

The Welsh were never shy about inventing excuses for a party, and Gŵyl Mabsant was their village holiday par excellence. It honored whichever obscure saint the parish had drawn in the ecclesiastical lottery with sermons no one remembered and highly unorthodox athletic competitions everyone did. There was blindfolded wheelbarrow-driving, wrestling, cockfighting, something called “old women’s grinning matches”, and of course drinking - the kind of wholesome pursuits that made “community spirit” synonymous with black eyes and empty kegs.  

Paul Pitcher Day

The English County of Cornwall had its own invention to celebrate the eve of St. Paul’s Day (January 23): Paul Pitcher Day, which consisted of breaking old jugs and pitchers, then immediately getting drunk from fresh replacements filled with alcohol. The logic behind this ritual? Smashing the old to welcome the new. Symbolic renewal, or just early recycling? Either way it’s the kind of holiday tailor-made for millennials: a spiritual justification for breaking dishes and buying new ones. We’re pretty sure that Ikea would sponsor the entire thing in a heartbeat.

St. Monday

A holiday for not going to work. Yep, for centuries, a good portion of Britain’s working classes simply decided Monday was no day for work at all. St. Monday wasn’t canonized by Rome, but he lived comfortably in every alehouse. Tailors, shoemakers, and smiths alike treated the first day of the week as a recovery period - or, depending on the tavern, as an extension of Sunday. Employers fumed, productivity plummeted, but the pubs did a roaring trade. If ever there was a holiday that deserves resurrection, it’s this one. Slackers everywhere should be lobbying the Vatican.

Feast of Fools

The Feast of Fools was truly a medieval masterpiece. Once a year, Europe’s clergy turned their cathedrals into comedy clubs, complete with donkey brays for hymns and priests in drag delivering mock sermons. It was both parody and purge, a collective raspberry blown at the solemnity of the church. Inevitably, the church authorities banned it, which is how you know it was fun. If reincarnated today, one imagines the Feast of Fools would thrive on cable news, where the line between burlesque and piety is already paper-thin.

Lupercalia

Rome had a knack for festivals that were equal parts holy and unhinged. Lupercalia was their mid-February “fertility festival”: young men stripped to nearly nothing, ran through the streets, and slapped passersby with goat-hide thongs, allegedly to promote fertility. The women lined up for it, not because they enjoyed being thwacked, but because superstition said it might help them conceive. Today, Valentine’s Day limps along with chocolates and heart emojis; but once upon a time, love meant public nudity and livestock accessories. Progress, if that’s the word, has made things so boring.

Oak Apple Day (aka Pinch Bottom Day)

May 29 once brought out oak leaves in buttonholes to commemorate Charles II’s miraculous escape after a lost battle. Fail to wear your oak, and you’d get a pinch - or worse. It was part political loyalty test, part street game, and entirely an excuse to knock strangers about. The custom died, perhaps because it demanded too much knowledge of 17th-century succession politics. Still, there’s a certain charm in a holiday where the punishment for historical ignorance was physical assault.

The Festival of Pax

The good old Romans, again. The festival of Pax was a weeklong festival for the goddess of peace. A celebration of peace that looked suspiciously like a weeklong Roman bender. Peace, it seems, was best celebrated through inebriation. It seems their idea of “tranquility” was drinking until you forgot you were at war. The custom didn’t last long, possibly because a week of state-sponsored drunkenness was expensive, even by imperial standards. But think of the bliss of it now: a mandated seven days in which no one may argue online, except over who finished the last bottle.

Old Clem’s Night

Before the 20th century put a damper on dangerous fun, blacksmiths had their own patronal blowout: St. Clement’s Day/Old Clem’s Night, November 23. It began with what can only be described as proto-fireworks - the “firing of the anvil,” in which gunpowder was stuffed into anvils and then hammered until the night sky crackled with sparks and shrapnel. Having narrowly avoided blowing themselves to kingdom come, the smiths then moved on to singing, drinking, and a sort of metallurgical trick-or-treat. Dressed as “Old Clem,” they went door to door begging for beer, fruit, nuts, or coin. Imagine Halloween but run by drunk blacksmiths carrying anvils.

Plough Monday

The first Monday after Epiphany saw English farmhands dragging a plough through town, demanding money, ale, or both. Refuse them and your doorstep might be ploughed up. Think of it as agricultural trick-or-treating, but with the looming threat of property damage. The celebration continued into the night with dancing, drinking, and all-around revelry. In spirit, it was the working man’s Kickstarter: give us money and join in the fun, or we’ll dig a furrow in your threshold.

Goose Day

Michaelmas (September 29) was once celebrated with roast goose, under the belief that poultry was insurance against financial ruin. “Eat your goose and you won’t want all year,” went the saying. It was superstition dressed up as dinner, but at least it produced a satisfying meal. Reintroducing it might not stabilize the economy, but it would provide another opportunity to gorge ourselves silly. Think of it as a warmup to Thanksgiving.

Saturnalia

Perhaps the most famous Roman festival, Saturnalia turned December into a week of gifts, gambling, and role reversals. Slaves played master, masters fetched wine, and everyone wore silly hats. Christmas took over its slot in the calendar but none of its anarchy. Imagine how different December would be if we replaced “Elf on the Shelf” with open-class gambling and enforced role-swaps. Suddenly the season looks brighter.

Whipping Day

Some holidays sound like they were invented by people who got bored with polite company, and Whipping Day is one of them. On Easter Monday across Central and Eastern Europe, men armed themselves not with swords but with willow switches - often braided and decorated with ribbons - and went around playfully whipping women. The logic, or maybe excuse is a better word, was fertility: a brisk switch across the legs and backside was supposed to guarantee health, beauty, and future children. Women, in turn, could douse their admirers with buckets of cold water, which, we think, might take the immediacy out of the whole fertility thing. The custom, an unholy mash of baptism and slapstick lives on in parts of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, where Smigus-dyngus (Dyngus Day) still manages to turn Easter into a water fight with light domestic violence.

Needle Pointing Day

Medieval Europe had a knack for inventing festivals devoted to mockery, and Needle Pointing Day was tailor-made for that. Entire communities would gather to ridicule each other’s embroidery - crooked stitches, garish colors, or unintentionally pornographic saints. It was public humiliation disguised as cultural critique, an early form of Yelp review for household handicraft. A cycle of ridicule, embroidery, and ale. Call it the first open-mic night for housewives. Like so many medieval traditions, it perished once people discovered more efficient ways to be cruel.

Muster Day

In colonial America, communities were obliged to gather for militia drills - a sober-sounding affair known as Muster Day. In practice, the musket practice was perfunctory at best, a kind of opening act before the real entertainment began: drinking contests, brawls, and the sort of “general mayhem” that suggested the colonies were better at carousing than defending themselves. Muster Day became less about martial readiness and more about testing one’s liver capacity. By the end, the only thing standing at attention was the ale barrel.

In Praise of Foolish Holidays

Maybe the moral here isn’t that we need to relight anvils with gunpowder or go around whacking strangers with goat hides - though, honestly, it would improve the news cycle. Maybe it’s that somewhere along the way we mistook safety and efficiency for joy. We got so good at trimming the rough edges that we sanded the whole thing flat, until our holidays look like they were designed by HR.

We’ve convinced ourselves that progress means safety, and safety means sameness. No more risk, no more chaos, no more reason to worry the neighbors might show up dressed as goats demanding cider.

And yet, look around: everyone’s angry, exhausted, medicated, and scrolling themselves into stupors. Safe, yes. Happy, not so much.

The old festivals were messy, ridiculous, sometimes dangerous. They left bruises, hangovers, and the occasional scorched barn. But they also stitched people together in ways a hashtag never will. A community that can laugh at your bad embroidery, drink from your boot, or bail you out after Plough Monday has a kind of intimacy you can’t mass-produce.

Maybe what we’re after isn’t just the ale-soaked chaos of the past, but the reminder that celebration isn’t supposed to be neat. It’s supposed to be human. Real holidays - whether it’s Saturnalia or St. Monday - acknowledged that life was hard, short, and often absurd, so you might as well get drunk and blow off some steam in the village square before the wolves come.

So, here’s our modest proposal: let’s stop congratulating ourselves for “Dry January” or “Sober October” or “Amazon Prime Day” and a calendar full of consumer rituals, all tidy and nutritionally void. Let’s bring back a little deliberate lunacy. Not because we need more hangovers, but because we need more excuses to look foolish together. If America wants to relearn how to chill out and start laughing together again, it could do worse than to resurrect the ghosts of these half-forgotten feast days. Because a nation that’s forgotten how to cut loose is a nation halfway to the grave.

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