Becoming a Little Less Grinchy: Rethinking Ritual Inversions

I’ve always been a little allergic to Christmas cheer. The carols, the shopping frenzy, the forced smiles—they all felt hollow. But reading The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow) nudged me into seeing things a little differently. What if the goodwill we show in December is not just sentimentality, but a faint echo of older, wilder traditions—moments when societies deliberately flipped their norms, from Saturnalia in Rome to the May Queen in medieval Europe? Suddenly, even the rituals that are easily dismissed look like fragments of something deeper. The past moments were when hierarchies inverted, roles reversed, generosity flowed freely. These weren’t just parties; they were experimenting in living otherwise.

We also used to look at events like Burning Man, Pride parades, or Carnival with a skeptical eye. They seemed indulgent, chaotic, or simply frivolous. The The Dawn of Everything shifted our perspective, again. Seen in this light, maybe modern festivals are not trivial distractions. They are cultural descendants of those inversion rituals. Pride reclaims stigma as a celebration. Burning Man suspends the logic of money in favor of gifting. Carnival masks dissolve everyday boundaries. Each creates a temporary world where norms are questioned, and alternatives are enacted.

We realized that our own negative view was blocking us from seeing another way to understand these events. These events are not just spectacles; they are reminders that society is not fixed, that we can imagine and embody different arrangements, even if only for a few days.

Perhaps the real lesson is that inversion festivals, ancient or modern, are less about escape than about memory: they keep alive the possibility that things could be otherwise. 

Color me a little less green this Christmas.