The Purpose Of: Celebration
We all love a good party. The chance to gather with friends and/or family for a time is always an incredible time. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, or just because, we all look forward to celebrating. Why though? Is it just because we work other times and get the chance to take a break and have some fun? Is it the gathering of loved ones we just long for? What is the purpose of celebrating?
If you think about it, when we gather for any type of celebration it’s to gather to celebrate a person or people. Happy birthday, congratulations, you are loved, and so many other times are all about bringing attention to and on someone else. That part is usually easy, but to truly celebrate someone is to honor them.
It doesn’t seem like we live in a society, at least where I’m at, that having a culture of honor is an important thing. Many other cultures and countries put a lot of emphasis on truly honoring someone. So if I were to say the purpose of celebrating would be to honor, I wouldn’t be far off but what does it look like to celebrate and honor someone?
One of the things we do in our family is birthday blessings. I picked this up from a friend of mine several years ago and have adopted it. It’s easy to say “happy birthday” to someone but it takes some heart and some intentionality to truly offer a blessing to someone. For whoever’s birthday it is, everyone present will take some time speaking words of encouragement, life, or blessing over them. It may be immediate family around a dinner table or it may be friends and extended family. Either way we try to always bless and honor the person we’re celebrating. We get to speak some things into and over them, oftentimes it’s things they may not even see in themselves or at least not yet.
Another great way to celebrate and honor someone is with the gift chosen. Obviously if you’re buying a gift for a small child you hope to get something they enjoy and are into but you have a lot more room to operate. When purchasing a gift for someone else though, be thoughtful and seek to get something that would mean a lot to them. This is where “it’s the thought that counts,” can really come into play but you have to think. A small gift that has had a lot of thought put into it will usually mean more than a larger, more expensive gift that just has a price tag on it. Whatever the gift, I would encourage you to make sure there’s a handwritten note or card attached which brings me to my next point.
A handwritten note or card can kind of serve the same purpose of the blessing I spoke of earlier. It shows that you took some time and thought to write something specific to and for that person. I think this is true of family, close friends, acquaintances, and employees. If we can take the time and show that we’ve thought of them in a meaningful way it will go a long way.
What about you? What are some ways you seek to celebrate and honor those in your life? If the purpose of celebration is to honor that person or people, we should be ones who celebrate well! Life is temporal but that’s also what makes life so precious. Let us seek to celebrate others every chance we get and make it a big deal, because they are! Stay the course, you have what it takes!