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December’s Other Holidays

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Pity Sir Humphrey Gilbert.

 

 

 

 

The dashing Humphrey spent years and fortunes enriching Queen and country by pressing England’s colonization of North America in the 16th century only to have his achievements buried under the celebrity of his little brother and publicity savvy clothes horse, Sir Walter Raleigh, whose principal accomplishments were losing track of the Lost Colony of Roanoke and getting filthy rich exporting tobacco from lands Gilbert pioneered.

December’s like that.

Kind of.

From daybreak on the Feast of St. Grwst until the ball drops on New Year’s Eve, our 12th month is chock full of hard-working holidays with a lot to offer a fest-hungry nation if only they could break free from the tinseled tyranny of Christmastide. In fact, there are no end of annual observances packed onto the calendar’s last page, and yet most people still view December as little more than 31 dizzying days of carols, cookies, credit card debt and really bad TV specials followed by a hangover. It just ain’t so, though, and people with room in their hearts and datebooks for something besides a single jingle-bell Juggernaut will find within the merriest month alternative amusements aplenty.

Besides providing an opportunity to recall the many presumed contributions of St. Grwst, for example, Dec. 1 is also National Pie Day and, with a commendable eye toward dietary balance, Eat a Red Apple Day. Falling on the first Friday in December this year, the 1st was also National Salesperson Day, which service-oriented theme flowed naturally into Bartender Appreciation Day, observed on the first Saturday of the month, which one might have appropriately celebrated on Dec. 2 by raising a glass to National Rhubarb Vodka Day.

Since the United Nations has named 2017 the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development, and since December is designated as Worldwide Food Service Safety Month, value-minded folks who celebrated International Volunteer Day for Social and Economic Development on Dec. 5 could rightly claim a three-fer. Value-minded folks who like to economize on personal cleaning products may have preferred to observe Dec. 5 as the arguably more festive Bathtub Party Day.

On Dec. 6, a few dollars and a few minutes are that’s needed to celebrate both National Pawnbrokers Day and Microwave Oven Day.

Some of the thousands observing Pretend to Be a Time Traveler Day each Dec. 8 act as if they’re from the future and treat modern technologies with exaggerated disdain. Other Time Travelers spend the day making like they’re from the past and regarding even dated mechanical contrivances like electric can openers and dumb-phones as objects of reverent wonder. Many others who find dated contrivances genuinely wondrous hold the phone until Dewey Decimal System Day on Dec. 10.

If most of those self-described holidays sound decidedly unofficial, it’s because they decidedly are. Except for the very few national anniversaries so designated by Act of Congress, almost every “Day” of the year is just somebody’s pet obsession that happened to catch some small piece of the public fancy. But if no government agency exists to certify all those half-baked holidays, since Popcorn Day in 2013 the diligent men and woman of National Day Calendar have done their best to impose a veneer of rationality upon an increasingly congested yearbook. The organization currently recognizes well over a 1,000 national days, and if that seems like a lot consider that each year it receives about 10,000 requests for calendar space and typically denies all but a handful. It’s also worth noting that the growing catalog of jump-up jubilees has largely been compiled during the last 25 years and can be attributed almost entirely to the Internet’s ability to connect folks who share a common fixation. That we aren’t plagued by an endless succession of sappy celebrations that start with the words “Hug a…” can be attributed almost entirely to National Day Calendar.

If no parades hindered Centennial State traffic on Dec. 11, it could be because too many people spent National Mountain Day in their kitchens performing whatever arcane rites are expected of the faithful on National Noodle Ring Day. December 13th is enshrined on the calendar as Ice Cream and Violins Day, so named because on Dec. 13, 1903, Italo Marchiony patented a machine to mold ice cream cups, and on Dec. 13 more than a hundred years later rock violinist Ben Lee broke a world record by playing                                              his instrument at more than 14 notes per second.

Conceived and popularized in 2000 by Michigan State University art students Casey Sorrow and Eric Millikin to celebrate “all things simian,” National Monkey Day has grown into a globe-spanning holiday that shares its love equally between all non-human primates including apes, tarsiers and lemurs. Take part in National Underdog Day, Dec. 15, by rooting for the worst team in any league. Get the most out of Barbie and Barney Backlash Day on Dec. 16 by parking your kid in front of the TV and treating yourself to 24 hours free of repetitive sing-a-longs and tedious story re-telling.

Dec. 18 is Answer the Telephone Like Buddy the Elf Day. National Hard Candy Day comes but once a year on Dec. 19, and on Dec. 20 one can observe Mudd Day by telling anybody who’ll listen that Dr. Samuel Mudd, who in 1865 set the broken leg of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth and was sent to prison for it, got a bum rap. Whether or not they celebrate it, most people can appreciate the motivation behind Humbug Day, Dec. 21, and scheduling Re-gifting Day on the Thursday before Christmas is simply good sense.

The twenty-second.

A whole day just for Haikus.

How did that happen?

There are 103 national days in December, a glory-starved gallery of second-string saturnalias culminating with the self-explanatory Leap Second Time Adjustment Day on Dec. 31. Many of them are silly, many others are at least half serious, few require much in the way of time, money or emotional investiment, and none of them get the respect they deserve. If you were wondering why Underdog Day falls during the same month as the year’s uncontested holiday heavyweight, just ask Sir Humphrey.

Skulking sculptor creates 4-way split

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One sunny afternoon a local developer summoned sheriff’s deputies to a Hilltop Road residential construction site to investigate what could be termed anti-sculpting. Sometime during the previous 24 hours, a determined anti-artist had transformed a handsome 9-square-foot stone mega-sign welcoming passers-by to “The Observatory on Independence Mountain” into four smaller signs that, individually, convey no clear message. Although the anti-sculptor didn’t sign his work, the doleful developer suspects he may have seen his handiwork before. Other anti-acts against the planned subdivision have included strewing roofing nails along the entrance drive and depositing the site’s building permit and blueprints into the most fragrant part of a portable toilet. Officers promised a month’s-worth of increased patrols and, with luck, the destructive Degas will soon be making big rocks into little ones for the county.

White and Wrong – A kindly indictment

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Anybody who knows me will tell you I’m totally Mr. Christmas.

Totally.

I’m jolly, for one thing, and, as a “winter”, I look sharp in red. I also drink deeply from the cup of human kindness when thirsty, love getting free stuff, and harbor no fear of reindeer such that are properly restrained.

True, nobody who knows me ever calls me Mr. Christmas to my face, possibly because they also know I’m uncomfortable with praise, being subject to so very much of it, but that doesn’t mean they don’t apply that tender title to me outside of my hearing. It just fits, because I love everything about Christmas.

Okay, so I’m not crazy about unloading precious monies better spent on myself obtaining gifts for people who’ve possessed everything they could ever wear, watch, read, hear, and play since I gave it to them at least a dozen Christmases past.

And sure, I could do without the herd of relations flying in from all Creation, looking for a weeks-worth of sit-down suppers, messing up my guest beds and persistently trying to “catch up” in the middle of my favorite television shows.

For that matter, it kind of sticks in my Craw of Peace and Brotherhood that the networks routinely dump all of my favorite television shows each December, replacing them with syrupy seasonal fare that invariably looks cheap and canned in reruns.

And I admit to feeling a twinge of Grinch everytime some Kringle-Come-Lately throws on a free-with-your-fill-up Santa Hat and carries on like they’re Mr. Christmas, when anybody who knows me will tell you they couldn’t muster a fraction of my legendary cheer on their best day.

And then there’s the weather, which usually stinks.

On the other hand, I love Christmas lights.

A lot.

Maybe too much.

Christmas lights are the reason for the season, as far as I’m concerned. Inexpensive to purchase and to operate, the smallest string transforms the blandest landscape into a glittering realm of beauty and wonder. The monotonous paths of our lives are made splendid, the everyday enchanting, the dreary delightful and the mundane marvelous.

I will flatter myself to say that I put on a pretty decent display, myself. I do it in part for myself, because it makes coming home after dark even more agreeable than usual, and partly because Peter, my brother and Cohort in Christmas, wouldn’t hesitate to flay my hide clean off if I didn’t, but mostly I think of dressing up the house in its holiday finest as my own little gift to the neighborhood. It pleases my generous heart to think of the grateful smile that must touch my neighbors’ pursed lips as, wending their weary way home after a long day of drudgery and disappointment, they spy my fanciful handiwork through its encircling veil of trees and spontaneously recommit themselves to Charity and Good Works, and – then and there – decide to bite the bullet and pay for the costly and life-saving medical treatment so desperately needed by whomever passes for Tiny Tim in their impoverished household.

It’s my gift to the world, really, because Tiny Tim could grow up to invent some boon to all Mankind, like bacon-flavored toothpaste, or self-applicating toilet paper. You’re welcome in advance.

I confess that, driving down my street of a December night, I feel a warmth and solicitude toward those of my neighbors thoughtful enough to cheer my passage, and take disapproving note of those so dim of spirit or black of heart that they can’t be bothered. But there’s a third group on my street, and on every street, and they’re the ones to whom I direct this impassioned epistle. I’m talking about you white-light people.

Wrong

One month a year you get to wreath your colorless hovels in sparkling splendor, and you choose white lights. For 31 too-short days you can illuminate your benighted lives in every shade of joy, and you put up white lights. After feasting upon the incandescent banquet that I have laid for you, you go home and plug in a string of white lights.

How is that right?

I mean, don’t you white-light people get enough undifferentiated visual stimulation every other day, hour and minute of the year? Every lamp in your house is white. The flourescent bulbs at your office are white. Car headlights are white. Streetlights are white. Flashlights are white. Your Coleman propane lantern burns white. Even the sun – the sun – is little more than a koo-koo-kajillion-watt, thermo-nuclear yard light bathing the Earth in an inexhaustible stream of radiant vanilla pabulum and keeping the solar system up at all hours.

Show some imagination, is all.

In my book, white lights aren’t properly Christmas lights at all. They’re just really tiny reading lights that you can’t possibly read by. They’re an affront to the concept of Christmas decoration. A broken promise. A cheat.

“Icicle” lights? Who do you think you’re trying to kid? They don’t look any more like icicles than Cindy Lou Who looks like a Bumble.

“Star” lights? Last time I checked, stars come in a variety of designer colors like blue giants, red dwarfs, and green clovers. Truly, you mock the very Cosmos.

Right

Look.

I’m not trying to make trouble.

I’m not proposing that Congress enacts laws criminalizing the sale, possession and use of white “Christmas” lights, and if they did anyway I would be among the first to call for moderate sentencing guidelines for persons convicted on such charges.

It’s Christmas, after all.

I’m not asking for Peace on Earth, or a 92-inch plasma, although I wouldn’t turn my nose up at the plasma. I’m just asking for a shade more creativity. You’ve got the whole spectrum to choose from. Be the rainbow.

I’m begging you.

Color my world.

Landlord accused of cloning violations

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A resident of Northwood Drive called authorities on July 16 to report that someone, quite possibly his landlord, had “cloned” or “spoofed” his cell phone number. The aggrieved tenant – who claimed to have run a modeling agency from that address and “has always dated younger women” – told the responding deputy that he suspected his landlord – a former “top guy” with either NASA or the CIA who owns a houseful of “high-tech spy equipment” – may be using the pirated phone number to call the complainant’s many girlfriends. The officer contacted the landlord, who didn’t seem overly surprised at their visit and flatly denied the allegations. The complainant, he said, “is a paranoid schizophrenic and goes up and down, but lately he’s been making a lot of wild accusations.” The deputy hung up the case after both parties agreed to put their difficulties on hold until the tenant’s lease runs out next month.

A Call to Action

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cat7-citizenPeople who know me will tell you I’m a good citizen.

That’s very gratifying to me, because I have always endeavored to serve as a civilizing example to those of less taut moral fiber, and it’s nice to know my efforts aren’t going unnoticed. Fact is, while doing one’s civic duty can at times be tiresome, the burden of responsible behavior can be managed to a great extent by the imposition of a Code. “Brush my teeth,” would be a thoughtful personal mandate, for instance, or “Pay for things”, or “Don’t bother Steve.”

Being exceptional, of course, my own bar is set much, much higher. For one thing, my own Code strictly forbids me to commit crime unless there’s a chance that personal or financial advantage might be gained thereby.

Also, I will never engage in productive work if letting someone else do it for me might give them a sense of accomplishment, or perhaps a mild aerobic benefit.

By my scrupulous rule regarding personal property, upon finding somebody’s lost wallet I don’t waste precious time and energy attempting to locate the careless clod that is its rightful owner, but instead pump its contents directly into the economy through retail channels, helping to foster prosperity for all.

And, as a good citizen, whenever I perceive a threat to the public weal, I act swiftly to expose it. I do now, selflessly and without any thought of remuneration, sound the alarm on what I believe to be an insidious menace of such colossal proportions that, left unmitigated, it may very well spell catastrophe on a planetary scale.

If you keep rolling your eyes they could freeze that way. Would you like that?

I count myself among that number of uncritical thinkers who suppose the Ancients possessed important knowledge and advanced insights long since lost to Humankind. Take the Egyptians – although utterly lacking modern technologies, the ancient Egyptians were able to raise enormous stones to dizzying heights. Clearly, they were privy to amazing secrets that made it possible for Egyptians with swords to induce Egyptians without swords perform difficult and dangerous tasks.

Indeed, only arcane knowledge can explain ancient Egypt’s marvelous irrigation systems – great ditches, miraculously free of their original dirt and capable of directing moderate quantities of water in a single, downhill direction. And what long-buried scientific inspiration led that desert-dwelling people to discover that desiccated flesh liberally treated with naturally occurring salts would not immediately spoil?

cat6-conePerhaps most remarkable, it was the ancient Egyptians who first divined that, after several hours under the broiling sun, women with melting cones of beeswax, honey and spices affixed to their heads tended to smell more fetchingly than women not so equipped.

Magical!

 

 

And they invented beer.

So we see that the Pharoahs knew a thing or two about a thing or two. And it turns out that one of those things was biology. It has recently come to my attention that a particularly reflective sect of ancient Egyptian philosophers was the first to scold otherwise happy diners with the admonition “You are what you eat.”

It was the contention of those courageous scientist-priests that the flesh of all living creatures must
necessarily accrete from what stuff they consume. It was their further contention that all living creatures consume pretty much the same stuff, or at least stuff that’s already consumed pretty much the same stuff. Taken together, those two irrefutable principles tend to suggest that all creatures are composed of pretty much the same physical substance.

Except they’re obviously not.

Those canny contemplators were also perfectly aware that there exist good creatures and bad creatures, not to mention a whole lot of creatures exhibiting varying degrees of good and bad characteristics, which patent truth presented a knotty logical inconsistency. If we all eat the same stuff, why aren’t we all the same? Their answer to that philosophical question was both elegant and, I think, inescapable.

Everybody poops.

Because animals, good and bad, are material constructions of the food they eat, it was their belief that the general food supply must contain both good and bad components. If some creatures are better than others, it must be because they retain a greater portion of food’s positive elements and excrete most of its negative ones. Likewise, creatures that fall toward the bad end of the spectrum must necessarily absorb a larger part of what is evil in their diets, while expelling the greater part of what is good.

An illustration ~

cat5-bat

The ancient Egyptians hated bats. To their way of thinking, bats were sneaking and cowardly and carried disease and exalted the darkness and weren’t really birds and weren’t really rats and they squeaked. It would have been quite impossible for an ancient Egyptian to hate bats any more than they already did. By the reasoning outline above, bats clearly retained virtually everything vile in their food, and pooped out its every redeeming ingredient.

cat1On the other hand, ancient Egyptians loved cats. Cats were sacred to them. They weren’t gods, exactly, but they were high enough on the divinity chain to hobnob with all the best deities. Cats had dash, and polish, and a naturally superior attitude that just screamed “quality.” The only thing an ancient Egyptian loved more than a cat was two cats, And so forth. They spent small fortunes mummifying their cats so they wouldn’t have to face the Land of the Dead without them. And if cats were so very, very good, they plainly extracted every ounce of goodness from their sustenance, but incorporated no part of its badness.

If we are to accept the ancient Egyptians as authorities in all fields scientific – and we’ve already established that they invented beer – then we must also yield to this gastronomical analysis and its unavoidable conclusions. Call it the Unified Theory of Doody.

Even as bats suck all the badness out of their food, so does iron-clad logic dictate that their excrement must be entirely good. Bat guano, despite its undeserved reputation, can only be the most sublime substance in existence.

Conversely, the defecations of cats can only be the most vile and toxic emissions imaginable, having been efficiently stripped of every last particle of good.

But why, you may in your tragic ignorance wonder, is this explosive information relevant to inhabitants of the 21st Century?

Americans own something like 90 million cats. The average cat defecates twice daily, producing approximately three ounces of poop during each episode. That’s something like 18,000 tons of concentrated evil flowing into the nation’s pristine landfills every single day. Add to that the 10,000-ton holocaust waged daily by another 50 million feral felines, and the magnitude of the crisis becomes plain.

The horrific truth is that if something is not done to stem this toxic tide – and done quickly – we’ll soon confront a calamity of Biblical proportions. The ruin that awaits us beneath that relentless accumulation of devilish distillation will make the specter of death at the hand of Global Warming seem a mercy.

So what must be done to save Humankind from looming litter-box Armageddon?

Don’t ask me. I’m a thinker, not a doer.

cat2I’m also a good citizen.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.