steam curls from the pot
hands pass bowls across the table
time rests for a while
I don’t celebrate holidays in the conventional sense. Not the way calendars demand, not the way shops decorate windows weeks in advance, not the way clocks strike midnight as if change can be forced by a number. I’ve never cared much for the assigned dates.
What I celebrate, instead, are people.
A holiday, for me, is simply an excuse to pause. To gather. To remember.
I’ve come to realize that ritual is less about the day itself and more about the company. The calendar doesn’t matter. What matters is the small reminders that we belong to one another.
Sometimes that means cooking a simple meal together. A pot of soup shared between friends on a rainy night. Bread torn with hands, not knives. Steam rising, fogging the windows, the warmth of the room making the cold outside bearable. These are the kinds of meals I remember more vividly than grand feasts. Because it isn’t the food that makes it special, but the presence of someone on the other side of the table.
I think of a winter in Ljubljana, years ago. Snow had fallen heavy overnight, and by morning the city was muffled into silence. A friend invited me into her apartment, where she had baked a loaf of bread. The oven warmed the whole room. We ate slices with butter that melted before it reached the crust. We spoke little. The bread was enough.
That day wasn’t marked on any calendar. But it remains a holiday in my memory.
Other times, celebration means walking. Long walks with no purpose but to move side by side, speaking when words arrive, remaining quiet when they don’t. In Bern, I often walk the loop along the Aare with my sister when she visits. The path curves with the river, the water green and insistent, the air filled with the smell of wet leaves. We don’t exchange gifts. We exchange footsteps. The walk itself becomes the ritual.
I once celebrated with strangers in Palermo. It was midsummer, the streets alive with heat. A group of neighbors gathered in a courtyard, passing plates of pasta, pouring wine into mismatched glasses. I had wandered in by accident, drawn by the smell of garlic and tomatoes. Someone pressed a plate into my hands. I didn’t know their names, and they didn’t know mine. But for that evening, we belonged to each other.
Holidays, I realized then, don’t require explanation. They require participation.
Making things by hand is another form of celebration. I remember repairing a broken ceramic cup with gold, the slow work of kintsugi. The crack became the decoration, the scar became the story. Sharing that cup of tea later with a friend felt like a holiday, though the calendar said otherwise. Because the act of mending — of taking time to restore rather than discard — carried the same weight as lighting a candle or singing a song.
Sometimes I wonder if conventional holidays, with their schedules and expectations, make us forget what celebration is supposed to be. We wait for a certain day to tell people we love them. We buy gifts because a season commands it. We rush to fit meaning into twenty-four hours, forgetting that meaning doesn’t follow the clock.
What I have learned is simpler: you can create holidays anywhere. They can last five minutes or five hours. They can begin with a shared coffee or a phone call or a walk in the rain. They don’t need permission. They only need intention.
A few months ago, I cooked dinner for a friend who had just returned from a long trip. Nothing fancy: rice, vegetables, fish. We ate slowly, talking about the places he had seen, the people he had met. At one point, the conversation paused, and we both sat quietly, listening to the rain against the window. That silence was as much a part of the celebration as the food itself.
Later, when he left, I washed the dishes and thought: this was a holiday. Not because the calendar said so, but because time had paused, and I had shared it with someone I cared about.
In Japan, I once stayed in a small inn near the coast. The owner prepared breakfast every morning — miso soup, rice, grilled fish, pickles. It was the same meal each day, unchanged, unceremonious. But by the third morning, I realized the repetition itself was the ritual. Her quiet presence, the careful placement of dishes, the way she bowed slightly as she set the tray down. That breakfast became more sacred than any festival.
Sometimes celebration is simply doing something with care, again and again, until it gathers meaning like dust on a windowsill.
I don’t celebrate holidays the way most people do. But I celebrate people.
I celebrate them with food cooked and shared, with long walks, with the making and mending of small things by hand. I celebrate them in moments that are not marked on calendars but are written in memory.
And I think, perhaps, that is all we need. Not grand events, not expensive gestures, but rituals that remind us quietly, consistently, that we belong to each other.
Because in the end, the dates will fade. But the taste of bread in a warm room, the sound of footsteps beside you, the presence of someone across the table — these are the holidays that endure.
life 
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