Modern Holidays — Mechanisms and Conditions for Rooting of “New-Old” Holidays: Commercialization of the Holiday

Recently, most researchers of modern festive culture point to the loss of the true nature of the holiday in the current global world. Today, holidays have become more «casual», «routine». Festive intonations remain in everyday life. The gradual disintegration of a single celebratory culture manifested in the natural coexistence of religious and state holidays, old and new, one’s own and others’, characterizes the 21st century primarily and certainly relates to the processes of globalization and the dominance of multicultural trends. Modern culture places the holiday in a completely different context. The traditional holiday was “built-in” in the production life cycle, and the place of today's holiday is the process of consumption. Firstly, the modern life of society is based on fundamentally different foundations with the semantic dominative shifts from the producing material goods to consuming, the essence of which consists not in satisfying the material needs of a person, but in the manipulation of signs. Secondly, the opposition of work and rest is significantly transformed, shifting towards free time as the main value of human life. Thirdly, the mythological principle underlies the modeling of the world of a consumer society. The "miraculous status of consumption" and the mythology of the "golden age," understood as abundance, expresses this.