Some people go home on vacation just to survive and focus on mobile phones or football to avoid conflict with relatives. However, current research shows that this is a wrong idea. Any form of family ceremony can save holidays. It’s worth having everyone sit in the same room.
In a series of studies to be published in the Journal of the Consumer Research Association, hundreds of online subjects described their rituals with their families during Christmas, new year’s day and Easter, from decorating trees to looking for colored eggs. Compared with those who did not participate in the group ceremony, those who participated in the group ceremony felt closer to their family, which made the holiday more interesting and, in turn, happier. The most surprising thing is that the types of family meals, special food, religious rituals and watching balls in times square they describe have nothing to do with enjoyment. But the number of rituals is true. Obviously, having family rituals will make the holiday better and more enjoyable.
This study can only measure the correlation between subjects’ reactions, while causality is uncertain whether rituals will increase holiday happiness, or whether people who have enjoyed holidays will choose to perform more rituals? However, after describing the ritual, the enjoyment score is higher than before, which shows that simply thinking about the ritual can provide a warm filter for one’s experience.
“No matter what the ceremony is or how small it looks, it can help people really get close to each other,” said evul Sezer, a researcher at Harvard Business School and the lead author of the paper. “Some rituals we don’t even know why, but they still work,” she said.
Kathleen Vohs, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota and one of Sezer’s co-authors, believes that rituals can provide “small, unobtrusive ways” for people to share an experience without embarrassment or compulsion. She compares it to “obvious strategies”, such as, “Hey, everybody, sit around the kitchen table and we’re going to play Yahtzee”, she points out. “It may be easier to generate a lot of kickbacks.”