Hollowed Days
How the Empire Stole Your Sacred Time
The Empire of Nothing took your holidays and sold them back to you as shopping seasons, but the old meaning is still there if you look hard enough. Underneath the plastic eggs and the Black Friday sales, the question is whether you will keep performing hollow rituals or reclaim what was taken, some times multiple times.
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The Easter Question
Walk through any store in spring and you will see people loading carts with plastic eggs, chocolate bunnies, plastic grass, or all in one pre-assembled in china baskets of “goodies”. Ask them what any of it means though and watch them fumble. They will tell you it is for the kids but cannot explain what fertility symbols have to do with springtime. They might mention tradition, but pressed further, they will admit they do not know. They participate because that is what you do.
Christians fare only slightly better. They will tell you Easter is about Christ rising from the dead, but can’t tell you why a rabbit lays eggs on resurrection day. They will tell you the eggs are for the kids but cannot explain why children need a fertility symbol to celebrate their god conquering death.
They might mention spring and new life but this ventures into the pagan realm more than the christian one and when pressed further, they will admit they do not know. They buy the plastic grass and the Chinese-made baskets like everyone else because that is what you do. The ritual continues, hollowed out and the meaning severed.
The Empire of Nothing does not need you to understand. It needs you to consume. Easter spending reached $18.1 billion in 2024. The meaning is irrelevant to that transaction.
The Pattern
This is the pattern across every mainstream holiday. The name survives. The date survives. The meaning is extracted and replaced with consumption. The population performs rituals without knowing why, purchases without understanding what, marks time without sacred significance.
Christmas was the nativity, incarnation, God becoming flesh, divine humility entering the world. The average American cannot articulate what they celebrate. They buy gifts because they are supposed to buy gifts, decorate to compete with the neighbors more than for their own happiness. They stress about money because the Empire demands tribute. The personal gifts market alone is projected to reach $138 billion by 2030. The meaning has been buried under wrapping paper and credit card debt.
Easter was resurrection. Now it is a rabbit that lays eggs. Most Christians cannot connect the symbols. The fertility symbols are pagan leftovers from the holiday’s stolen date. The Empire kept the eggs, discarded the resurrection, and parents buy plastic grass without knowing why.
Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Labor Day, Presidents Day were civic holidays meant to honor sacrifice, labor, history. Now they are nothing more than three-day weekends and mattress sales for most. The Empire does not want you remembering labor struggles or fallen soldiers. It wants you buying at allegedly 40 percent off. The meaning extracted and replaced with consumption.
Thanksgiving followed the same trajectory. The original meaning was settlers and natives sharing food in mutual survival, gratitude for assistance through a hard year. Whether accurate or mythologized, the stated meaning was relationship and provision. That meaning faded. What remained was family gathering, shared meal, spending time together. The holiday became about kinship bonds rather than the historical event. But even family gathering proved too meaningful. Black Friday encroached, then Cyber Monday, then November became Christmas shopping season. The average American will spend around $890 on Thanksgiving-related expenses. The meal is no longer the point. The meal is what you do before you go shopping.
The First Hollowing
The Empire of Nothing did not invent the hollowing. It inherited, perfected, and realigned it for its owns gains.
The Christianization of Europe was a campaign of cultural replacement. The Church could not eradicate pagan practices, so it absorbed them. Saturnalia and Yule were wrapped into Christmas. Eostre became Easter. Samhain became All Hallows Eve. The names changed, fluid celebrations of nature and cycles became hard dates on the calendar. The symbols were repurposed and the celebration became control.
But this created a strange inheritance. The values embedded in these holidays, light in darkness, rebirth after death, the triumph of life over cold, these were the “real meaning” most people grew up with. The warmth of gathering in the darkest months. The hope of spring returning. The connection to cycles that actually govern human experience. The Church tried to redirect these impulses toward its own theology.
The Empire later redirected them toward consumption. But the underlying traditions, the real meaning, kept operating beneath both hijackings. People still gathered in winter because winter is dark and hard. They still celebrated spring because spring returns. They still honored ancestors because the dead matter.
The pagan traditions survived in the bones of the holidays. The Yule log. The evergreen tree. The costumes and spirits at the thinning veil. The Church papered over these with saints and tried linking some with evil. The Empire then realized the possible markets and steered them toward sales. Neither succeeded in killing what lived underneath for those willing to look and return to their roots.
Two Holidays Hollowed Out and Jammed Together
Yule was not Christmas. The distinction matters.
Yule was the Germanic winter solstice celebration, the turning point when darkness peaked and light began its return. Where the tribe feasted and warriors placed their hands on the boar’s bristles to swear solemn oaths to drive back the darkness and ensure the return of the sun.
Christmas was the Christian nativity, a liturgical feast marking the birth of Christ. These were separate holidays from separate traditions serving separate purposes and at completely different times of the year. Yule belonged to the north, to the pre-Christian peoples who watched the sun and marked its return. Christmas belonged to the Church calendar, moved to December to be merged with existing celebrations. The Church absorbed Yule’s symbols, evergreens, fire, feasting, and attached them to the nativity. The modern holiday is a hybrid, neither fully one nor the other.
Yule’s meaning was light returning after the longest night, survival through the dark months, the oath and the feast and the fire. Christmas’s meaning was incarnation, God entering the world, divine humility. Celebrated with the giving of gifts like the wise men and family gatherings.
Later the Empire serving neither saw its opening. It kept the name, kept the date, kept the non religious symbols, stripped both meanings, and filled the shell with consumption yet again. The average person cannot tell you what Yule meant. They cannot tell you what Christmas means theologically. They can tell you about gifts and shopping and family stress. Two sacred observances hollowed into one transaction event.
The Pagan Contrast: Meaning Woven Into Reality
Pagan holidays survive mostly intact because they remain tied to observable cycles and lived practice.
Yule is not an arbitrary date on a corporate calendar. It is the longest night, the solstice, the turning point. You do not need a priest to tell you when Yule occurs. You can see it. You can feel the days shorten and lengthen. The rituals reflect reality: fire in darkness, evergreen through death, feast after the lean months, oath-swearing before witnesses because the new year demanded commitment.
Beltane is not a greeting card invention. It is the shift into summer, the height of light and life, fire and fertility and the celebration of growth before the work of harvest. The rituals align with what is actually happening in the world.
Samhain still breathes. The thinning veil, the honoring of ancestors, the acknowledgment that death is real and the dead remain with us in memory and practice. This is not abstract theology that can be hollowed out by commerce. It is lived experience tied to the turning of the year.
The Norse practitioner does not need a sermon to explain why Yule matters. He watches the sun set at 3 PM and understands. The modern Christian needs a pastor to explain why Christmas matters because the date itself tells him nothing. It floats un-moored from any cycle. December 25 was chosen to absorb pagan holidays in an attempt to convert them, not because it reflects any observable reality or even the reality of the nativity story.
This is why pagan holidays resist hollowing. You cannot commodify something that is woven into the fabric of the year itself. The Empire can sell you a Yule log, but it cannot sell you the solstice. It can sell you a Samhain decoration, but it cannot sell you the thinning of the veil. The meaning is not contained in products. It is contained in the relationship between human and world.
Halloween: The Anomaly
Halloween remains meaningful to many while being pagan-rooted and continually fought against. Why?
Halloween originated as Samhain, the Celtic celebration for the veil between worlds thinning. It was about death, ancestors, the turning of seasons, the coming dark. The Norse celebration of Vetrnætr or Winter Nights was also similar. The Church tried to convert Samhain into All Hallows Eve, the night before All Saints Day. The conversion never fully took. The symbols remained: spirits, costumes, facing fear, acknowledging mortality.
Here is the key distinction: Halloween’s commercial overlay aligns with its actual meaning to a higher degree than most. Dressing up, facing the macabre, celebrating death and the supernatural, these are Halloween but also Samhain. The Empire did not have to hollow it out because the holiday was already compatible with what the Empire sells. You can monetize costumes and candy without destroying what the date meant.
Christmas by contrast requires hollowing. Incarnation, divine humility, God becoming flesh, cannot be packaged. So the Empire buries it under 100 gifts and tells you this is what the holiday means now.
Halloween also receives the most resistance from certain groups. Religious institutions, recognizes Halloween as a threat precisely because it retains its meaning attacking it with accusations of devil worship.
The Childhood Illusion
There is another layer to why holiday gatherings feel hollow now.
Many people remember their childhood holidays as good times, warm gatherings, the way things should be. But children are often oblivious to reality. They do not see the tension between relatives. They do not hear the passive-aggressive comments. They do not notice who drinks too much or who disappears into another room or who leaves early with an excuse. They just notice the cousins, and food, and games, as they should.
What seemed like warmth was often chaos. What seemed like family unity was often people tolerating each other for a few hours because that is what you do. The children laughed and played while the adults navigated dysfunction. Growing up means at some point seeing what was always there. The chaos, the toxicity, the performance of family without the substance. Many young adults feel the dissonance. They remember holidays as meaningful, but when they return as adults, they find stress, conflict and obligation. They feel it should not be this way. They are right. It should not be. But the problem is not just that the meaning was never what they thought it was.
The Empire sells nostalgia for holidays that never existed. Warm family gatherings, meaningful connection, the “real meaning” of the season. That meaning was already hollow for most with many toxic relatives using holidays and blood relation as a justification for ignoring behavior you other wise wouldn’t. Children just could not see it at the time.
The Guilt Weapon
Toxic relatives have always known how to wield the holidays, the weapon is guilt. You do not see them all year. They have nothing kind to say when you do, but come Thanksgiving, you are expected to sit at her table, endure her jabs and smile through the disrespect. Because family. Because tradition. Because that is what you do.
Because DNA obligates you, that blood relation automatically places someone in your inner circle, in Innangardh, deserving of your time, your presence, your endurance of their toxicity. The holiday becomes the enforcement mechanism. The guilt trip becomes the leash.
Innangardh, your inner circle, should not be granted by birth alone, it should be granted by loyalty. Your tribe consists of those who stand with you, share your values, treat you with respect. Utangardh, the outer world, includes strangers and acquaintances, but it also includes relatives who have not earned their place. A toxic aunt is not family she is simply related, and relatives fall on the dividing line. They can become Innangardh through loyalty and conduct. They can remain Utangardh through disrespect and disloyalty.
The holiday guilt trip only works if you accept the lie that blood equals family. Reject the framework and the weapon loses its power. You are not obligated to endure toxicity because someone shares your DNA. You are not required to perform family for an audience that does not actually care about you. The Empire wants you compliant. Your toxic relatives want you present and manageable. The truth serves neither of them. Relatives are not automatically family. Family is defined by loyalty, if your blood relatives cannot meet that standard, they belong in Utangardh.
Many these days talk about never cutting off family, or ho horrible it is that people go zero contact but they never ask main two questions.
What did they do to cause the person to go non-contact?
and How many of those who went non contact, simply stopped making first contact?
All relationships are a two way street.
The holiday table is not an obligation, It is a choice. It should be chosen to spend with your true loyal family that care about each other, that don’t just talk to you when you call but care enough to check in on their own accord. Life is too short to do otherwise.
Tribal Reclamation
As much as I hate the terms, Friendsgiving and Friendsmas, they serve as indicator and to make my point. Friendsgiving has exploded in popularity. Searches for Friendsgiving ideas have tripled since 2015. Nearly a fifth of Americans celebrated Friendsgiving in 2023. Among young adults, 42-44% participated. Gen Z is embracing it even more than Millennials, with 46% of 13-39 year olds planning to host holiday gatherings.
The pattern extends to Christmas. “Friendsmas” has emerged as a parallel phenomenon. In the UK, 30% of adults now celebrate Friendsmas, with 45% of Gen Z planning to mark it this year. One in ten Gen Z explicitly prefer Friendsmas to traditional family Christmas.
Sixteen percent of Friendsmas celebrants say it provides an escape from family stress. But the number choosing friends over family is likely higher than those who are willing to admit it. The Pew Research data shows 73% of Americans still claim spending time with family is the top priority. But claimed values and lived values do diverge. The same people claiming family as priority are opting out of family gatherings in record numbers because their views differ so wildly from their family.
This is re-tribalization. Family defined by loyalty, not simply by blood. Relatives fall on the dividing line between Innangardh and Utangardh. They can become tribe or they can remain mere relatives. The inner circle is not granted by DNA alone. It is granted by loyalty, shared values, willingness to stand together even when standing together is inconvenient.
Friendsgiving and Friendsmas are embryonic forms of what tribal living looks like. People are recognizing that their blood relations do not always share their values, do not respect their boundaries, do not always merit the designation of family. So they build their own.
The Empire of Nothing wants you dependent on the isolated but will settle for the nuclear family. Parent to child, child to parent, nobody else. That isolation makes you weak. That isolation makes you a better consumer. But tribe, family, people bound by loyalty and values rather than accident of birth, that is dangerous, harder to manipulate. They might actually support each other when the Empire tries to extract something from them.
This is the old meaning returning through the back door. Returns to meaning by stripping away the materialist shell and focusing on actual human connection.
The Wolf Does Not Need a Calendar
The Empire of Nothing took your holidays and sold them back to you as shopping seasons. It told you family means DNA and loyalty means nothing. It separated you from your blood and your sacred time in the same stroke.
But the old meaning is still there, underneath the plastic eggs and the Black Friday sales. You can reclaim it. The wolf does not need a calendar to tell him when to howl or who to howl with. He knows.
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