Stop Day (or, "Real Holidays Just Get on my Nerves")

This Thursday past was declared a "stop day" at Holden Village. Stop Days happen every month or so and are precisely what they sound like: no one works. The mavericks don't shovel snow, the kitchen doesn't prepare meals. The only thing we do that remotely resembles our life in community is meet up for prayer early in the evening.

We coordinated this particular stop day because the village population was down to 60 people, almost all of them long-enough-term staff to have a sense of how to fend for themselves come meal time when the kitchen hasn't laid out a buffet. Sixty people, if you need an image, can be fed with fifteen pizzas. It's roughly the size of Valpo's Church Vocations Symposium, only locked away in the mountains.

The rationale behind a stop day is simple: we don't get regular holidays. We're a retreat center. The rest of the world gets a three-day weekend and spends it here, while we take care of the laundry and cleaning the bathroom and getting food on the table. Even the school doesn't get most holidays: when you have to be vacated from your classroom in time for summer Narnia programming to start, you don't build too many days-off-for-the-heck-of-it into your year. No Presidents' Day, no Columbus Day, not even a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. I go to work, and don't get mail, and the dining hall is crowded. No wonder real holidays make me cranky.

Alas, the school doesn't officially participate in Stop Days, either. Part of that is the business of not too many days-off-for-the-heck-of-it. The other part is that the last thing parents want to hear on Stop Day is they're back in charge of their own children. We compromised this last time around by declaring a half day and taking the elementary school on a hike to Lower Copper Basin. They had a good time of it; stopped to test out the bouncy fallen tree three quarters of the way up, built a fire when we got there, admired the frozen waterfalls in the distance. They didn't exactly go to school, and we didn't exactly turn them over to their parents. Altogether an agreeable holiday.