Editorial June 23, 1923 Issue

Holidays

Ella W. Hoag

When holidays were first instituted in Bible times, they were called Holy-days. They were days set apart from secular labor as sacred, and were to be used in the worship of God and in services especially consecrated to Him. Later, the sense of consecration in connection with them was apparently entirely lost sight of, and they came to be regarded from the standpoint of diversion alone. They were looked upon as opportunities for complete relaxation from all work, either in idleness or in mere play or sport, with no higher object attached to them than personal ease and gratification.

This understanding of the meaning of a holiday had the fatal tendency of destroying joy and satisfaction in work. There was always the looking forward to the day when work—at least temporarily—would cease, and when some respite from ordinary occupation would occur. Thought was given to planning for the holiday instead of to the importance and interest of present effort. Thus attention to and capability for the work in hand were lessened, and pleasure became largely the motive of living.

There has always been a protest in the better and wiser thought of mankind against this merely pleasure-seeking attitude. One wise thinker has said: "We enjoy ourselves only in our work,—in our doing; and our best doing is our best enjoyment." Because of such thought as this the world has within recent years been gradually awakening to the fact that its concept of holidays has been mostly wrong, and it has begun to preach far and wide that some better object than the mere gratification of personal sense must attend them, if they are to result in any real and lasting helpfulness.

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