Fight for Your Right to Party

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One reason for suppression was a fear that festivities could get out of hand and even lead to revolution. This fear was not unjustified: the carnival tradition helped fire up the French revolutionary crowds as well as uprisings of slaves and colonized peoples from the Caribbean to West Africa. When the Industrial Revolution took hold, holidays were eliminated in favor of the new work ethic: people were increasingly expected to labor all day, six days a week, and spend the Sabbath in sedentary prayer. A few traditional- style festivities survived--Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnaval in Rio and carnival in Cologne. But by and large, sometime in the past 300 years, the music stopped.

Yet something so deeply rooted in human culture is not easy to annihilate. The repressed just keeps on returning--in, for example, the rock 'n' roll "rebellion" of the '50s and '60s and what I call the "carnivalization" of sports events in the '80s and '90s, when fans began dressing in team colors and costumes, and performing dancelike activities like the "wave." Then there are all the festivities that have emerged spontaneously: the Burning Man Festival, the Berlin Love Parade and Halloween as an occasion for grownup revelry. We seem to be impelled, almost instinctively and even in the absence of surviving traditions, to create occasions for communal joy.

So here's my modest proposal for holiday reform. Forget the PlayStations, the Barbie-mobiles, the catalogs and camp-outs in Wal-Mart parking lots. Give, if you will, to the needy, and let the pine trees live. Instead, rent the local V.F.W. hall or a hotel ballroom, deck it with boughs of holly, and invite the entire town for a vast blowout. O.K., it won't bring world peace. But if we have this primordial capacity for collective joy, why not put it to use?

Ehrenreich is an essayist and the author of the forthcoming book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy