Home from the holidays

What are holidays for? They are regarded as almost a basic human right for most of the people we know, but this is a very modern assumption. The word “holiday” doesn’t occur in the Bible. For most people in the world, today as well as historically, holidays would be a luxurious and unrealistic idea. Slaves and servants never had holidays, nor even a rest; Jesus talks (in Luke 17:7) about how a servant who comes in after a long day’s work cannot expect to be invited to sit down and eat, but rather has to get food for his master first, hoping to be allowed to feed himself later – and the Lord clearly doesn’t see anything unusual in that.

Holidays start out etymologically as “holy days”, and they are days of celebration linked to particular saints or events from the Gospels. Sometimes there were fairs, with special foods (St Catherine cakes, Saint Lucy saffron buns) and lots of fun, and of course some had pagan roots, like May Day. But they were days off for everybody and a chance for communal play as well as eating and drinking.

These holidays are different from the concept of resting on the Sabbath, which has its root in Genesis and God taking a pause after the six days of Creation. There are many rules around the Sabbath for Jews: how far you may travel, exactly what counts as work and is not permitted, special celebration foods and candles, and some very beautiful traditions. The early Christians inherited this and celebrated both the Sabbath and the following day (“the Lord’s Day”), but much further down the line the emphasis shifted away from celebration to prohibition, especially with the Calvinists and the Puritans. Keeping the Sabbath holy was not supposed to mean having a holiday in any sense we would recognise. It was interpreted to mean going to church lengthily and repeatedly, not reading any book that wasn’t religious or improving (or even wasn’t the Bible, for some people); no playing, no singing (except hymns), no dancing, no running and so on.

Jesus has a word about this too, and luckily he’s no strict Sabbatarian: when his disciples get into trouble with the Pharisees for picking grains and chewing them while walking through a field on the Sabbath (which counted as manual labour or work, and so was against strict Sabbath observance), Jesus excuses them with a lengthy and learned account of King David during the high priestship of Abiathar. This is a classic example where I think Jesus was making a joke which doesn’t work as well on the printed page, as I discussed a couple of blogs ago; and the bit we remember is his classic pithy summing-up: “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” (Mark 2:27)

But it is fascinating to see the natural rhythm of people needing an occasional break also attested in the gospels, and the way that Jesus takes the responsibility to give the apostles some time off. Regularly he goes off into the hills to pray, but also to get away from the crowds that followed him, to have a rest. He gets into boats and sails away for a little while, to have some space, even if he’s not alone. When the apostles return from an early mission, they tell him all about it, and he says to them, “Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest a while” (Mark 6:31), so they all go off in the boat. The crowd runs round the lake to be there when they land, but at least they have had a little pause in their normal workaday lives. Maybe Jesus even had a nap, which we know he did on another occasion, on a cushion.

So holidays are to take a break, and people often go somewhere else to do it if they can afford it. It makes sense: staycations, invented when we weren’t allowed to leave our own areas during Covid, require a lot of discipline, or you find yourself doing exactly the same things as usual. The jobs are all sitting there reproachfully waiting for you, if you are at home.

On the basis that a change is as good as a rest, holidays can mean simply doing something else, from summer schools to retreats, which some people feel is easier to justify. Thus factory workers from London or industrial areas used to go down and pick fruit or hops in the southern counties for a couple of weeks in the summer. My grandfather used to go down to Kent from Leicester; my husband’s grandfather went from the East End, but he was too clumsy to pick hops, and was sent to look after the babies instead. It must actually have been hard work, but it was out in the open, and it was the only way to have a paid “holiday” at that time.

For our family, possibly because we worked for so long far away from the sea (but it may just be true for island dwellers), getting away on holiday nearly always means being beside the sea, the remoter the better. This is a question of early conditioning. We used to go to beaches in Pembroke or Anglesey when I was little, and they were vast (I was delighted to find that, unlike most things, this is still true even though I am now bigger), but if there was a single other family or person there, my mother considered it crowded, and we had to find another beach (a secluded cove would do, it didn’t have to be an entire headland). This is one reason why we don’t go abroad on holiday; we don’t have enough time to find the secret places, and there isn’t really enough coast on the European landmass to go round.

You can choose either to return to a beloved place on holiday, or enjoy new discoveries. We like both. It’s wonderful to know what exactly you need to take with you to be entirely comfortable (we have a list on my youngest daughter’s phone for both of our two favourite holiday houses). I don’t want to recreate home, I just need the tools I use every day, and it’s more sensible to take what the children rudely call my emotional support knife (a small and very sharp kitchen knife) rather than struggle with something less adapted to the job.

It’s difficult for women to have holidays, because there is an unavoidable amount of work involved just in living and looking after children. We always go self-catering, because I am a control freak. We like to set our own timetables, and we like to be able to try out the local delicacies. We eat simpler food on holiday, and we take the baking with us, which is easier now not everyone comes at once – we used to run out of brownies once the boys found the hiding place.

But housekeeping in other people’s houses always has an element of “playing house”, like the miniature kitchen in the sequel to Little Women. Compromise or making do is stimulating, and it’s fun to discover what you have to play with (I always like the kitchens best in dolls houses), and once you know what you can’t manage without (like the emotional support knife), you are good to go. One house we stayed in did not have a teapot; thank God for charity shops, and a teapot is on the list in Margaret’s phone.

One difficulty of going to remote places is tracking down a Sunday Mass. Often the information online and even more so in Catholic directories tends to be out of date, so you have to keep your eyes open and check small noticeboards. But it’s always a great pleasure to go to Mass in such a place. There are invariably some stalwart and very impressive women keeping things going, and I am embarrassed to think how meanly the Church treats them. A very elderly priest has driven a long way to say Mass in this church and needs to leave immediately after to get to another one at some distance. This is normal life for lots of Catholics, very different from the serried ranks of priests and monks at Masses in the Vatican; but much friendlier, and it’s a privilege to join in on Sundays with people like this.

I was very impressed by one woman in Scotland who managed to put across the notices as part of the Bidding Prayers. We prayed about the events that had just happened and those about to happen the following week, and we remembered the people the congregation knew as members, even though Father had only just arrived on a visit and wouldn’t be there another time. (If he can’t make it, they have a Liturgy of the Word and Communion service – run, I imagine, by some of the impressive women.)

Holidays are for making memories: shared memories, family memories, and photographs, even bad ones, are a great help here. Even a blurry photograph will work as a trigger for remembering a happy afternoon or an unexpected discovery on a walk. As I get older, I try to make a memory consciously. If we are doing something particularly enjoyable, I try to pack it carefully into my mind, so that I will remember the details when I am somewhere else or I need a boost or a bit of comfort. It’s like the interesting small pebbles of which I tend to have a pocketful by the end of a holiday. I take them home and distribute them among my coat pockets, to find unexpectedly later in the year.

I think the great thing about holidays is doing exactly what you feel like without feeling guilty (this may be just Catholics). One crucial element of the packing is the Book Bag, which we assemble over a few days before leaving, and the books in it are communally available. And that’s why you need to be away from your normal work areas; if I haven’t got my computer, or any filing, or washing baskets, or my kitchen, or the tidying up I’ve not got around to for ages, I can sit and read without the feeling that I should be doing something else. That is an absolute luxury, and it’s another reason why we like sea holidays: nothing is so good at wearing children out so they go to sleep. When the children were little, we started by planning two beach sessions (before and after lunch), but we rapidly discovered that one longer one meant that everyone fell asleep after lunch, and you could get some reading done before any more sandcastles needed making or admiring. So everyone gets a holiday, and comes home refreshed.

Kate Keefe composes musical settings for the Mass and writes about the psalms. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.