Holiday Madness

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the national King holiday (but actually the twenty-sixth observance of the holiday, nevertheless, let that pass), I pause to take stock of the many holidays that populate the American calendar. January, named for the two-faced god looking forward and ahead, compels me to look in the latter direction as I ponder the days to come, most notably the "important dates" (as Hallmark pretentiously puts it) that we celebrate, or purport to celebrate.

Americans lucky enough to be employed work more than any other people in the industrialized world, only getting two weeks off per year at best. The days they have to celebrate significant anniversaries and rituals include a few paid holidays, Sundays, and very unimportant holidays co-opted by the greeting card trade or invented from whole cloth by the same in order to justify sales not only of greeting cards but a lot of junk that intelligent people would not ordinarily buy at any other time. Not coincidentally, most of us don't get off for days in the final category. New Year's Day, a federal holiday recognized specifically for the purpose of allowing the populace to recover from the celebrations of the previous night, is a day one can easily dispense with. I just did. So let's look at some of the other holidays that pop up and crop up throughout the year in these United States.

St. Valentine's Day is the most celebrated holiday to immediately follow New Year's Day. February 14 is celebrated by lovers with roses, candy, and dinner dates in honor of the patron saint of romance - hardly a reason for getting the day off, and if you are hopelessly single, it would be dishonest to demand it. The day promotes romance as an excuse for going on an exorbitant spending spree on your sweetheart, if you are in fact a man. The culture demands that you wine and dine your lady, if only to make her forget that the only reason she needs a man is because she only makes 70 cents for every dollar you make, and besides, candy manufacturers and restaurants need your business somehow. Not to mention jewelry stores, so you can bet on seeing Valentine's Day-related ads on television once you've finished paying off your Christmas bills.

The idea of having at least one holiday per month to keep people engaged in the passage of time and the spending of cash is evident in the popular observance of St. Patrick's Day in March, where everyone is encouraged to be Irish for a day. Does that mean, on March 17, non-Irish peoples spend a day feeling guilty? St. Patrick's Day is a serious holiday in Ireland, a holiday which the people spend in church and/or pausing and reflecting on the trials and tribulations on the motherland. Here, it's just an excuse to get drunk. Which is what being Irish for a day means. Considering all the suffering the Irish have been through at the hands of the English, watching a non-Irish-American celebrate St. Patrick's Day gives me the idea of what it must be like for a black man to have to listen to Pat Boone. And I'm not too happy about green-dyed cookies and bread, either. But I love the parade.

Since Easter Sunday usually falls in April, it fits in nicely with the one-holiday-per-month gambit. And I love Easter. It's a quiet holiday welcoming spring and renewal, and even its secular side - egg dyeing, chocolate treats - is more tasteful than the incessant commercialism that is inflicted on Christmas. But Easter sometimes falls in March, and that poses a problem for the greeting card companies who like to keep us engaged in the celebration business on a monthly basis. So a new holiday for April was invented - Administrative Professionals Day, once called Secretary's Day until the American penchant for overinflating the importance of everything required an upgrade of the title but not the position. (I'm sure they have an official reason for placing this day where it is on the calendar, but I doubt I'd buy it.) Honoring your secretary for a job well done is now a day to be celebrated in the workplace, not a day to tell your secretary that she (he? highly implausible) is getting a raise. Because even if Warren Buffett gets around to giving his secretary a raise, she's still going to be paying more of her income for taxes and necessities.

Mother's Day in May and Father's Day in June then follow, both on Sundays, but despite the commercialism of both, the twin days were in fact derived from sincere efforts to honor parents. The woman - yes, woman - who advocated a Father's Day in the early twentieth century wanted it in June because her own father was born in June, not because Mother's Day, first unofficially observed in 1877, was in May. I've never gotten the meaning of Grandparents Day in September, though. As someone who was very close to my maternal grandmother, I quickly came to realize that every day is Grandparents Day. But then, springtime Sundays set aside for parental recognition are way too sedate, hence the growing popularity of Cinco de Mayo. The growing Mexican-American population has something to do with this, of course. But, unlike St. Patrick's Day, a holiday of the Irish nation, May 5, the anniversary of the Mexican victory over an invading French army at the Battle of Puebla, is a holiday of the Mexican state, a holiday commemorating a day in history more relevant to Mexican citizenship than American partying. That, of course, hasn't stopped many Americans from being Mexican for a day, making Cinco de Mayo the second time on the calendar that we temporarily assume the ethnicity of a people with a pretty unfortunate history. And Americans love any holiday on which they get to bash the French.

July 4, Independence Day, is the one holiday we Americans can celebrate together without our motives being suspect or questionable. Even the Americans most skeptical about their own country's character wouldn't bash the Fourth. Indeed, as Paul Fussell wrote, it's the one day the United States should receive nothing but praise. The first Sunday in August, though, is a day that should receive nothing but ridicule, as Hallmark promoted the idea of making that day Friendship Day when it became apparent that August had no holidays to celebrate. Americans, in a rare show of resistance to marketing, wisely laughed off this "holiday," and it appears only on Hallmark calendars and is likely not even celebrated by Hallmark employees.

And yet people see nothing preposterous in the end-of-summer tradition of Labor Day, the first Monday in September, a day that honors all workers - the same workers who are increasingly cast aside in the global economy. International Labor Day occurs on May 1, the anniversary of a workers' riot in Chicago in 1886, but Labor Day in both the U.S. and Canada was moved to September to cleanse it of its socialist origins.

Halloween? Harmless, much less so than encouraging children to give each other valentines in February to hook them on keeping St. Valentine's Day going as adults with needless spending. Thanksgiving and Christmas are, despite all of the difficulties they produce, worth the trouble. Because they remind you how much you love your family, even if you think you don't.

Which returns me to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. While I'm happy that we have such a day to honor the slain civil rights leader, I'm not happy that it's celebrated on a Monday, and only to simplify record keeping for accountants. This condition, in addition to the law that turned Washington's Birthday on February 22 into Presidents' Day on the third Monday in February and moved Memorial Day from May 30 to the last Monday in May (which is May 30 in 2011), cheapened the meanings of those days and the integrity of those same meanings. Especially Memorial Day, where we kick off summer early with a three-day weekend to have barbecues and see the latest Hollywood blockbuster movies in concert with a day to . . . honor our war dead.

We're a pretty sick lot, we Americans. But we're not terribly sick, as we gave up on celebrating Veterans Day on the fourth Monday in October and moved it back to November 11 where it belongs. Even so, if the only reason you have to look forward to Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is to get a day off in January - assuming you work in a law firm or a post office - then maybe you should be judged not by the content of your character but by the extent of your intelligence.