Celebrations and Peace
Yes, it’s a human psychology. People during festivities and celebrations feel happy, bonded, love and loved. They are closer to families, friends and near and dear ones. This situation brings in prosperity, hope, light and a feeling of righteousness. Celebrations can indeed bring peace to the world when they are inclusive, respectful, and aimed at fostering unity among people from different backgrounds.
Close to the Christmas and the New Year, the world may forget for some time the unpleasantness, dissatisfaction, warring angers and blistered egos. Territories, boundaries, ideology and ambition all wilt and wither in the confetti showers of pleasure and joy!
People across communities and countries, internal and international greet and meet, exchange pleasantries and sweet nothings. This brings down, though temporarily the devilish intentions and covert hatred.
When goodness prevails, businesses strengthen with spirits of achievement high.
Celebrations hold immense potential to bring peace, stability, and economic benefits to the world when managed inclusively and responsibly. By emphasizing shared values, fostering respect, and promoting sustainability, celebrations can serve as a powerful tool for building a harmonious, prosperous, and sustainable future.
Christmas is celebrated in more than 160 countries across the world, making it one of the most widely observed holidays globally. Christmas celebrations can varies significantly based on cultural, religious, and social traditions and differ in the type of feast and fashion but it is evident in the air.
All Christian-majority countries like the United States, Canada, Brazil, most European nations, the Philippines, and Australia, Christmas is a major religious and cultural holiday celebrated with significant public and private festivities.
The Non-Christian-Majority Nations where Christianity is not the dominant religion, Christmas is widely celebrated as a secular or cultural holiday or new found social celebrations of likings or new fad. For example, India, Japan and China are such countries.
Countries with minor Christian like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, and Afghanistan, may have private celebrations or tolerance to the social fun and feast.
While not all countries officially recognize Christmas, its cultural and commercial significance ensures that it is celebrated in some form across most parts of the world.
A very significant importance of Christmas is that it marks an end of the existing Gregorian calendar, and the following week observes a New Year, for a fresh Calendar year to ring in. This change of Calendar from one year to the next, for example, from 2024 to 2025 has its own hopes, bucket-lists, ambitions, plans, new beginnings, new horizons, new dreams!
This is for sure, the time that needs to be celebrated with open arms, warm heart, loving smiles, dancing toes and bear hugs.
This one day, the New Year will bring in Celebrations fulfill several psychological needs and functions for individuals and communities, rooted in human nature and cultural practices:
- Social Acceptance
- Expression of Joy and Gratitude
- Mass Mentality
- Hope and Renewal
- Collective Healing
When these feelings set in, a human being changes to being more a humane, a social being, a loving individual and this brings peace and tranquility among the community, society, region, country, in neighborhood, in the world. People across will celebrate forgetting and forgiving despise, dooms, wars, wounds, and displacements. Even the countries like Ukraine, Russia, Sudan, Syria, Myanmar, Haiti, etc., all will quietly or openly, privately or publicly celebrate the dawn of new hopes and beginnings.
Let’s hope for personal and global solidarity, Cooperation, and sunrise.
We wish all the best of 2025.
Cheers.