holidays certainly help with realizing how much space in my brain is taken up with;
"I MUST do something I'm not really interested in/so even without an authority as negative as in childhood, my assumptions kick in/this mandatory thing is good but between how I don't want to do it and how I'm innately BAD, I'll invariably fail/and when I do so I'll be punished, probably disproportionately/so now I have even less interest in doing it, and therefore more certainty I'll fuck up and be punished."
This is all about growing up in this grinding incessant context of punishment; as a kid I had exactly no way to judge that something not actually intended as a punishment wasn't just more being punished. It's got exactly nothing to do with holidays or religion except this is another place it happened in childhood.