Customization of U.S. Holidays: Agency and Nonconformity

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article under review, "Customization of U.S. Holidays: Agency and Nonconformity", discusses the topic of holidays with special focus on the variations and changes that societies, communities, and families have made in the ways of celebrating them, as well as the meanings attached to them.
The article, as I see it, consists of two main parts: a convincing review of existing literature (numbered section 2), and some conclusions and avenues for further research (sections 3 to 5). The sections reviewing the literature are of high quality. Relevant literature is cited in abundance, the structure and argumentation are clear and easy to follow, the insights are valuable. This section, even in its mere function as a review of the literature, makes the article worthy of publication.
The sections dealing with conclusions and further directions are decidedly less convincing. First of all, the article poses three questions in section 1, but does not offer concise, systematized answers to them in one of the concluding sections. Adding such a summary would be highly useful, even more so because it would help both the author and the readers in seeing whether existing scholarly work into holidays is possible to summarize at all, or whether the cited works from the literature are all so unique/idiosyncratic that a summary is hard to make.
The typology offered in section 3 is neat, although the fact that it lacks empirical foundation makes it look very tentative. It does split a continuum from near total adherence to almost none into four segments, but boundaries are not always easy to see, e.g. I had some difficulty understanding why "Friendsgiving" and "Galentine's day" are examples for different categories. The presence of the typology makes the reader ask "How would this be applicable to empirical research?", but the paper itself does little to answer that question. I understand that this fact partly arises from the genre (this being an essay), but it does leave the reader with a sense of dissatisfaction.
In the defense of the author(s), section 5 does contain some ideas that could help guide future empirical research. However, I had the feeling that the quality of section 5 was markedly below that of section 2, for example. The questions posed therein are more research questions of various breadth/depth than actually applicable ideas/solutions that can help future research in practice. The article posits that the field is lacking a general theory, and yet section 5 gets lost in mundane details such as meal planning and who is hosting an event. I believe that the article should present ideas for further research that show the promise of building a theory from the proposed empirical investigations, or, if the author(s) do not see the need for the ambition of theory building, at least a more coherent research program.

Some technical remarks:
Line 57, "as" is probably missing from the sequence "Social institutions such educational entities" after the word "such".
Line 84, "Santino (1996)" is referred to, but the reference list at the end only contains works from the author dated 1983 and 1995.
Line 159, "(Coontz 1992)" seems to be in a smaller font size than the rest of the text.
Line 185, "Caplow et al. 1982" is indicated, while in the reference list, Caplow is the only author of the work from 1982.
Line 296, the sentence "Since mostly couples were interviewed" is an unexpected change in the tone/mode the literature is being presented. Not once did the article refer to the data gathering method of the works cited, not even in the case of the work discussed at that point.
Lines 487-488, a work by Caplow from 2004 is listed which the main text does not refer to.

Author Response

I appreciate the suggested revisions.  Please see how I have revised the manuscript in the attached responses. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a very interesting article on an under-researched and undertheorized topic: the role of holidays in late-modern societies, their evolution over time, and their manipulation by individuals. It is, therefore, a theoretical text that revisits the main contributions of the literature on holidays in societies where, in many circumstances, agency prevails over structure. The article thus addresses the issue of non-conformity with periodic celebrations.

Its main originality lies in the proposal of a typology of holiday  ‘customization’ by social agents, a typology that may, in the future, enrich sociological theory about the role of holidays in contemporary societies. Also noteworthy is the generously sized section with proposals for future research on the topic.

Author Response

I appreciate the review.  Please see the attached file that provides my responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf