Ah, it is finally over. The Christmas season, that is.
As the ordinary shopper has undoubtedly noticed, the Christmas displays in stores seem to move inexorably forward year after year, extending the holiday season by intruding from the future into our present. Having undercut Thanksgiving and put Halloween within sights, the pressures of Christmas retailing have flattened the meaning of “seasonal.”
The last six weeks of the year used to be a retreat into the coziness of long nights, for gratitude and family bonding, looking forward and back. This is what I recall, well into young adulthood. Now the holiday season is layered with the fatigue of the too-long and the boredom of the over-familiar, a spectacle that delivers the psychic pressure of maintaining human relationships through the literal exchange of commodities. The retail strategy of branding every 6 weeks of calendar time a “season” to be observed through shopping, themed decoration, and commercialized social events is an occupation of time driven by capital, and never more so than from the beginning of October on.
How are we to go about imagining something else? How about a different kind of season? How about knitting together a counter-calendar, a “movement season” to overlay the prevailing American holiday season? Through the chance of historical events and the reclamation of imperial markers of time, social movements new and historical exist in calendar cycle proximity already. Whatever it is called—maybe the Long Hot Winter?—the days are there, waiting to be linked.
Here is how it goes.
It begins with the yearly recognition paid to the deepest resistance in all of imperial history, that of the First Peoples, on Indigenous Peoples’ Day in mid-October. Campaigns to rewrite Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples’ Day are well underway in many cities and towns, including some notable successes. Thinking of this day not in isolation but as the opening of a series of holidays, each celebrating and advancing an aspect of the Movement of Movements, properly positions the long-haul wisdom of the native cultures at the forefront of contemporary political and cultural resistance. Maintaining the holiday as coexistent with the official celebration of the “discovery” of the New World has the effect of fundamentally contesting imperial history, and more importantly, of shifting values. The message is that the heroism of Columbus is nothing compared to that of those who survived settler violence, theft, duplicity, supremacism, enclosure, and disease. The season of resistance and survival opens!
The day we presently observe as Martin Luther King Day, usually falling between the second and third weeks of January, marks the season’s end. Here we have work to do. The holiday as it is—sanctioned and sanctified, an official investment in a standard “great man” version of history, and therefore effectively defanged as the political holiday it ought to be—is in need of a makeover. The only political struggle associated with the holiday had to do with establishing it in the first place. After hold-out states were finally shamed into recognizing MLK Day, it proponents were satisfied and the holiday promptly lost its political edge. What we have instead are ritualized annual re-treads of basic achievements from a half century ago, sanitized of all associated radicalisms, simplified to the point of ignoring flaws and contradictions, and cut off from present day political forms.
Let’s reinstall some rebelliousness by calling the MLK holiday Movement Monday. It is a gesture that will remind all that Dr. King’s work and legacy is intertwined with the political movements that made the man. Also, renaming the day Movement Monday—ie in acknowledgment of social movements pluralistically, but timed to highlight Dr. King’s birthday, naturally—foregrounds the political synthesis Dr. King himself moved towards after the mid-1960s. Furthermore, contextualizing the one voice and leader against a mass movement comprising thousands upon thousands of activists who will never be individually recognized, is the most powerfully symbolic way to continue the struggle.
In between and around Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Movement Monday there are now in place occasions for annual displays and statements of resistance. For protests, this would include the days of political reckoning: the November general election and, every four years, Inauguration Day. On the discursive level, in recent years Thanksgiving Day has attracted serious revisionist attention, also from the perspective of the indigenous experience. If we can believe the conservatives, Christmas is currently a rear-guard front in the Culture Wars, as has been Halloween for the paranoid fringes of devout Christiandom. For those looking beyond the mainstream, people have been observing alternatives since the 1970s: Kwanzaa for the Afrocentric and Yule for the contemporary pagans. So there are precedents for deliberately deviating from the presumed norm.
Where it gets interesting is in the possibility for building into the calendar recurring grassroots political action. What has become the most politically threatening day in this whole stretch of calendar time is the day after Thanksgiving. At first having no name but Friday, the business media termed it Black Friday for its revenue-generating significance as the opening of the Christmas shopping period. In response to the day having become the materialistic frenzy we know now, the Canadian activist publishers Adbusters declared it Buy Nothing Day in 1997. Then, in the last couple of years, in addition to the bohemian refusals of Buy Nothing Day, the same Friday has become a day of strikes and demonstrations focused on the working conditions suffered by low wage retail workers, particularly those employed by Walmart.
Thus, Thanksgiving and Black Friday have emerged as a calendar focal point, connecting in temporal proximity the three-pronged actions fueled by critiques based on decolonization, anti-consumerism, and labor rights. Add to the deliberate timing of Buy Nothing Day and the Walmart strikes the happenstance one-two punch from this past year, the outrageous grand jury decisions in the Mike Brown and Eric Garner murders. The decisions were returned on November 24 and, less than two weeks later, December 3, first sparking and then snowballing mass outrage into a multi-local movement for police accountability. The density and endurance of this movement, which has tinted the entire season's news coverage, continues in part because the decisions were rendered in such nearness of time, stacked one on the other.
So, might we have the building blocks for a new season?
Given the variety of discontents on display, what presents is a problem of unity and commonality. Diversity, that neoliberal virtue, is again the obstacle, only not in its usual primary guise of identitarian gulfs, but rather in political priorities, sometimes contradictory demands, and naturalized constituencies. And yet the Ferguson protestors, the striking retail workers, and the “stop-shoppers” shared a calendar phase. As Jason Adams has argued, the occupation of time is as or more important than the occupation of space. How might localized uprisings and social movements that move in temporal proximity, but each with their own particular conditions, constituencies, messaging, and demands, come to form a common front? Perhaps it happens through a redefinition of the season, of common time itself. As historians and memoirists often describe it, a zeitgeist is fashioned through the sheer weight of bunched events. What I am after is something more like a saisongeist, or spirit of a season, a power that endures outside of singular events and that rolls around every year when the northern weather turns cold.
Am I the only one who can imagine a succession of insurgent holidays, observances, and excuses to get politically active and visible? What better way to celebrate the end of such a season than with a long mid-winter weekend of movement strategizing, civil disobedience, and coalition building, culminating on Movement Monday?