Exploring Quaker Experiences: Holy Days
Traditionally, Quakers refrain from celebrating Holy Days, instead viewing every day as sacred. However, in practice, many Quakers do celebrate Christmas, Easter, and other religious holidays. Some Quaker meeting houses may open on Christmas Day or celebrate the season with decorations, music, or candlelit meetings. Each meeting takes a unique approach to the holidays, reflecting the diverse spiritual backgrounds, traditions, and rituals observed by Quakers throughout the year.
We asked Friends to share their experiences of the festive season and to reflect on what it means to consider every day a Holy Day.
Ruth Tod shares how her local meeting celebrates Christmas:
“Every day is unique and special, and a time to find time for silence and quiet, to learn and to notice. It's because Quakers saw every day as sacred and special that they didn't celebrate any Christian festivals in the past. Personally, I find having some rituals and some stories is important to remind us of what life is really about. Christmas in particular is a time to remember to think about new birth and beginnings. It's a time to think about our gifts and think about inner light.
We don't open our meeting house on Christmas Day. Our meeting house has a candlelit meeting for worship on Christmas Eve, and people from the town come to that. It's a really beautiful, moving occasion. The place is full of candles, and we meditate and reflect on the light in the darkness. It can be an opportunity to express our hopes as well as our fears, and to remember that the fires are always burning, that the light can't be put out. Candlelit meeting for worship on Christmas Eve are a very beautiful way to connect with the spiritual aspects of Christmas.”
Trevor Bending discusses how culture informs our relationship to Holy Days:
“Many friends do like to mark Christmas for the traditional reasons, whether it's spiritually in respect of the birth of Christ or whether it's in respect to remembering friends who may not be Quakers. In terms of the season, a lot of people have holidays for a week or so at that time of year. I come from a family that has always celebrated Christmas in some way. My wife, for example, is a Quaker attender. She attends Quaker meetings regularly, but she does quite often go to mass or communion on Christmas Eve. People sometimes mark those kinds of events. Just as Quakers that have come from other backgrounds, sometimes mark a Hindu or Jewish or Buddhist festivals. We don't make a big fuss about particular days or particular events, but we're aware of them and, and in some ways we reflect the culture that we live in.”
Daniel Flynn reflects on why every day should be considered special:
“I was raised in Roman Catholicism, but I'm no longer a Christian. Christmas is one of the many rituals, and if I'm invited to a Christmas party I'll go. But we're here to rise to our unique calling. Every day is a new beginning. Every day is unique. The wisest people I’ve read say that today is the only day there ever is. So every day is an equal opportunity to use our unique human talents: silence, intuition and choice. Nothing else in the universe has that that we know of so far.”
Keith Braithwaite shares his thoughts on why Quakers meetings shouldn’t feel pressured to celebrate the holidays:
“My meeting is having a business meeting on Sunday and, as every year, it will be proposed that we open the meeting house for a special meeting for worship on Christmas Day, and that we have a Christmas tree in the meeting house with fairy lights and cake and so on. I will be pretty much alone in saying we shouldn't do that. If you want to go elsewhere to the places where those things are happening, the district is full of churches that will be open on Christmas Day. If you want to go do Christmas stuff there, by all means. But it's not part of our tradition. And, as in every other year, I fully expect that the discernment will not go my way, and we will open on Christmas Day and there will be some special thing, and there will be a tree, and there will be fairy lights. I feel sad about that, I feel as if my place of safety from the nonsense of Christmas is being taken away from me in the interests of cozy niceness. The way that Quakers have surrendered to Christmas bothers me. I think we are in danger of not paying enough attention to the hard won lessons of the 350 years of friends who came before us.”
Alistair Heslop remembers looking for connection and stillness at Christmas:
“Why do I do some of the things around Christmas? A good example would be Christmas cards. I loathe the thought of writing Christmas cards before I do it. But when I’ve actually finished doing it, and I've thought about those people I'm writing to, and I've made a connection with them, I usually feel quite good having written the Christmas cards.
On Christmas days in my youth, my grandparents, my aunts, uncles and cousins would come around on Christmas Day. Christmas time was chaotic and noisy and filled with food. By the time I got to 6pm, I’d had so much of Christmas Day that I had to go out and have a walk by myself. I wonder if there had been a meeting house I could have walked to and spent some time in silence with friends, might I have done that? Because obviously me getting out was me needing something, maybe that was silence and maybe it was connection. Writing Christmas cards is making connections with people, whereas going for a walk by myself was reconnecting with myself, when the rest of my day had been busy with connecting with other people. I wonder whether this connection actually makes all of those Christmas activities a spiritual activity, because it provides that opportunity for connection.”
Quakers come from a rich variety of faiths and cultural backgrounds, leading to diverse perspectives on Holy Days. Whether you’re celebrating Christmas, Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, other religious traditions, or choosing not to observe any special holidays, we wish you a peaceful and joyful end to the year.
