Celebrating religious holidays not on the prescribed day

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We were supposed to celebrate Hannukah at my sisters this year but everybody there got COVID. We decided to delay it until sometime between Christmas and New Year when everybody is home but that plan had to be scratched when everybody in my brother's family got some sort of respiratory illness. Recently I saw an article about the increasing popularity of January office Christmas parties and it made me wonder if celebrating on the "wrong" day is considered some sort of sin.

The common attitude in the Jewish religion is no prohibition against doing the rituals on the wrong day so if you want to do it do it go ahead but it is not really Hanukkah because you are not doing them at the same time as other Jews. In my not-deep dive, there were some arguments that December 25th is the wrong date but no mention of the downsides of celebrating on a different date. As mentioned in the Christmas party thread Christmas office parties in January are gaining in popularity. I have heard of instances where somebody was away at Christmas because they were sick or in the military and family and friends have a full-blown Christmas for them months later.

That brings up a bigger issue. We miss out on experiences through our fault and no fault of our own all the time. Often my instinct make it up as soon as possible as close to what it was supposed to be as possible. My years of experience have shown me rarely can you truly recreate what you missed out on. If you can make up enough to still be meaningful depends.

First of all, since you have not experienced it you don't truly know what you missed out on, it might have been bad. Just because society judges an experience as great and necessary does not mean it would have been good for you.

Personal experiences
This was not the first religious-based family gathering that did not happen as planned. There have been a bunch of them that ended up on Zoom due to COVID. They were better than I thought they would be. One year we had a blizzard the day of our scheduled Hanukkah family gathering so we did it a week later. That was ok but a month later would not have sat right with me. This past holiday season everybody was mentally exhausted from selling our parent's house and so while gifts eventually got mailed Hanukkah never happened for us. While I feel bad we missed out on it in the long term it will be yet another missed experience.

When COVID hit a whole bunch of proms and graduations had to be scratched, delayed, or altered. I went to my graduations but I barely remember them. The important thing was that I earned those degrees, even more important now that I know I achieved them as an undiagnosed autistic, not the ceremony where you dress up in a weird outfit, and listen to a speaker tell you you can do anything you set your mind to, and never lose your idealism, followed by the highlight of walking across the stage and handed your diploma. The highlight lasting no more than a few seconds. I think I would have found the "substitute" drive-by ceremonies people did more meaningful because they were smaller and more personal. What my college alma mater did is finally after a number of delays hold a "recognition" ceremony for the unlucky class of 2020 two years later. That probably would have seemed like the dumbest idea to me. Two effin years after the fact, are you kidding me? Out of curiosity, I watched a livestream of the recognition ceremony. To my surprise it was well attended and moving at one point everybody sang "I Will Survive". Oops. If I missed that no makeup, No redoing redoing the redo. You just never know. Truth is I might have felt differently if I were a member of that class who went on spring break not knowing that this was the last time I would set foot on the campus as a student.



I hijacked my own thread but I am still curious about how religions and sects within religions view celebrating on the "wrong" day.