Without question, they provide an excuse for gathering with family and friends, and if one should succumb to the duties of gift giving, decorating and cooking for large groups (in which there will likely be at least one relative you must also put up for the night), then you have signed yourself up for weeks of stress, chaos and the perpetual reimagining of leftovers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n My partner Harri and I celebrated the holidays vastly differently growing up. I had what he would call the \u201cstereotypical white household\u201d experience with turkey and Christmas lights and gifts under the tree. Harri, a second-generation non-trinitarian Filipino from Kalihi, didn\u2019t celebrate the holidays at all. (The holy trinity is the key doctrine for why Christians and Catholics celebrate Christmas. His family practiced a different type of Christianity that did not believe in the holy trinity.)<\/span><\/p>\n I lived in San Diego, California as a kid. My mom, aunt and grandparents, all born in Indiana, moved to the suburbs of San Diego when my mom was 10 and brought their Midwest holiday traditions with them. My mom purchased eggnog and fresh walnuts from the grocery store. My grandpa brought the Sees Candies box of assorted chocolates. My grandma made 4-5 different kinds of pie for Thanksgiving and her famous date bars sprinkled in powdered sugar for Christmas. My aunt and uncle were the queen and king of gag gifts. Before Christmas dinner we\u2019d sip eggnog and crack walnuts while Christmas music played on the stereo. After dinner, Mom would play Christmas carols on the piano, and I\u2019d beg to open at least one gift before bedtime.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Interestingly, Harri and I both ended up with careers in the restaurant business after graduating high school, and the idea of celebrating holidays, whether part of family tradition or not, became obsolete. As most restaurants are open during the holidays, and it is their busiest time of the year, holidays now equated to spending long hours at work. As the years passed, and I continued to be absent from holiday family gatherings, I lost my interest in the holidays completely. I didn\u2019t have enough money to buy gifts, I didn\u2019t have time to decorate my home and then clean it all up afterward, and I couldn\u2019t take time off to travel home. My family, especially my mom, had a hard time understanding my apathy for the months of November and December, and I inherited the persona of Scrooge.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Celebrating New Years with my boyfriend and his staff at his restaurant after hours. (Photo by Sarah Burchard)<\/p><\/div>\n When I met Harri, I was thrilled to find my non-traditionalist match. For the first four years of our relationship we both worked on Thanksgiving and Christmas. The only hint of the holidays in our relationship was a gift exchange between him and I on Christmas morning. No tree, no gingerbread pancakes, just one gift for him and one gift for me, and then off to work we\u2019d go.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n From age 18 to 43, I celebrated a handful of holidays. When the opportunity presented itself, I enjoyed going out to eat at my favorite restaurants or stopping by my neighborhood bar for a drink on Christmas evening if I had the night off. This is the way the restaurant industry celebrates. They spend time with their restaurant family and friends eating great food and drinking (sometimes a little too much). I even found time one year to bake cookies for the staff at La Vie in Waik\u012bk\u012b. That\u2019s the kind of holiday cheer I like to spread \u2013 making someone\u2019s night at work a little sweeter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The truth is, in Hawai\u02bbi, Thanksgiving and Christmas are settler colonizer holidays. While thousands of people in Hawai\u02bbi celebrated Thanksgiving on November 28, Native Hawaiians were celebrating L\u0101 K\u016b\u02bboko\u02bba (Hawaiian Independence Day). Makahiki (a new year’s celebration that historically featured communal feasts and games when wars were forbidden) is the December tradition of our host culture in the islands when Westerners celebrate Christmas and New Years.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Typically,\u00a0restaurant workers celebrate holidays at work with a special staff meal. (Photo by Sarah Burchard)<\/p><\/div>\n Do you have to celebrate the holidays just because you were raised to do so? The answer to that question has always been a no for me. It isn’t intended to be an insult to my family or heritage;\u00a0it is simply a shift in lifestyle that happened organically over time. So while the shops and malls are filled with shoppers scrambling to mark off their Christmas lists, as churches and community centers pack in, as traffic slows in the evening down King Street to enjoy the bright lights and shaka-throwing-Santa at the Honolulu Hale, there will be those who will take the backstreet to avoid the crowds and opt out of celebrating religious events of a religion they don’t even practice and paying off bills instead of going into debt. <\/span><\/p>\n Life is challenging enough. Life during the holidays is even worse. They exist to increase consumer spending, some say. They are a time to spend time with the ones you love, others believe. And while I\u2019m all for the latter, November through December \u2013 when lines are long and days are short \u2013 are just, in my mind, the last two months of the year to survive until we reset to a steadier speed in January. It is safe to say, the holidays aren\u2019t for everyone, at least not for me. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The closest I\u2019ll get to having a tree is visiting Christmas Tree park in Kaimuk\u012b. (Photo by Sarah Burchard) By Sarah Burchard | Staff Writer The holidays aren\u2019t for everyone.\u00a0 Without question, they provide an excuse for gathering with family and friends, and if one should succumb to the duties of gift giving, decorating and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":27618,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[83,81,84,82],"class_list":["post-27615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinions","tag-christmas","tag-holidays","tag-restaurant","tag-thanksgiving","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/62"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/27618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"New](\"https:\/\/kapionews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/new_years_eve_cart_blanch-300x200.jpg\")
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