If we can remember how to feast and fast, there will be Blue Mondays no more

On the alleged saddest day of the year, ‘Blue Monday’, Samuel Tarr attributes the dulled sense of joy and gratitude to modern society’s faded ability to balance the feasts and fasts of life. 

Today is “Blue Monday”, allegedly the saddest day of the year. And it’s no wonder. There’s hardly any sunlight or greenery outside these days, but you’re not allowed fairy lights or Christmas trees inside either. You look at the calendar and you’re scarcely halfway through Winter, but there’s no chocolate hiding just behind each date of a cadbury calendar anymore. You pop open a stray box of Quality Street, but there’s only those blue ones left. 

Yes, you and your Quality Streets are suffering from the post-Christmas blues. There was all that exciting buildup of festive spirit throughout December that fizzled out on the afternoon of Christmas day. All the presents had been opened and wrapping paper laid bare all over the floor, but there was nothing you could do about it because half a turkey and a Christmas pudding were pinning you to the sofa. At which point, or soon after, you began dreading the two months of Christmasless winter which lay ahead.  

Better the highs and lows than the flatline

Part of our problem, I suspect, is that Christmas is the only feast day we really have left. Of course there used to be ‘Christmas-tide’, ending on Epiphany (5th Jan), but that seems to have been mostly forgotten too. These days, people hardly even make a meal of Easter. The medieval peasant in England would have had around seventy feast days throughout the year. But without these holidays (holy-days) interspersed throughout the year, all our festivity slides towards the back end of the year and puddles in December.