October 31st, 2018

Happy Halloween!

Kind of weird to have a "holiday"  (and I use the term loosely) in the middle of week anymore.  I thought all of them had been moved to the far more convenient Friday or Monday.  Well except Christmas and New Years Day oh! and Thanksgiving.  Hmmm  I guess it's just the lesser holidays that have been moved now that I actually think about it.  Easter always moves around on it's own anyway so that doesn't count.

Still, I confess that when I was much younger and they started moving holidays around I was a little ticked.  How dare you move that day!  And only for the purpose of giving people 3-day weekends? And then they started combining holidays.  Instead of Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's birthday being separate, now they are celebrated by car salesmen everywhere as Presidents Day!  "Come in for the huge Presidents Day Sale"  Because somehow buying a car is a form of celebration.  Well, I guess the car salespeople will celebrate having made a sale.  And the president's faces are on money.  Maybe that's the connection?

It was great, as a kid, to have an unexpected day off from school in the middle of the week.  Always a nice surprise.  A Tuesday/Saturday celebration.  That is a Tuesday that felt more like a Saturday.  And I really loved school.  Yes, I was one of those bizarro kids who really loved school.  But even I appreciated the novelty of a mid-week day off once in a while.  I never really knew what to do with myself on a middle of the week day that wasn't a regular school day.  And how do you celebrate that day properly?  I mean, it's the reason we have the day off. Shouldn't we be doing something special?  Especially as a kid.  As a child you are tied to whatever decision your parent makes.  If they weren't into celebrating arbor day, nothing was getting planted, right?

And Columbus Day, seriously?  We are still celebrating that?  Why?  He never actually made it to America.  So all that stuff I was taught in primary school was wrongwrongwrong and I'll still never get the little rhyme out of my head "In 14 hundred and 92 Columbus sailed the ocean blue"  and discovered America.  NOT!  We all understand now that is not the case.  Though plenty of other explorers actually  were here...Ponce de Leon, Amerigo Vespucci, Leif Erickson, Sir Francis Drake... and we aren't celebrating them!  I know, instead of calling it Columbus Day, we could call it Explorers day!  Or something like that.  Just a thought. I mean if they can change the Washington's Birthday to Presidents Day, surely it wouldn't be a big deal to change a day that is just flat out wrong . 

Attentioin who ever is in charge of Holiday decision on a federal level:  we are talking about the fellow who was Our First President and therefore the beginning of a trend and kind of an important guy, to say nothing of his accomplishments as a Revolutionary War General and one of the creators of this country and we don't celebrate his birthday anymore?  But we still are holding on to Columbus day?  I find that weird.

When I became a working adult, I was all over a 3-day weekend for any reason at all.  Don't care.  Call it National Clean up Your Dog Poo Day, give me an extra day for my precious weekend and I'll celebrate with you.  And I don't even own a dog!

But actually, I hardly ever got any of those lesser holidays off anyway.  Almost every job I ever had was at least peripherally medical and we didn't take time off for President's Day or Columbus Day or Martin Luther King Day or any of those.  And honestly I don't know of any job that closes for Halloween.  Halloween. The one Holiday that SHOULD have been moved to the weekend, and it wasn't.  Little kids, all dressed up, excited, racing around the neighborhood with a rapidly heavier bag of loot, amped up on sugar and now they have to hurry up and go home, take off the costume and make-up and go to bed because tomorrow is a school day?  Are you insane?  It'll take them an extra hour just to cheer down enough to stop talking about how cool it all was and sort through those goodies.

Didn't you do that?  Sort through the candy?  Count to see how many of each thing you got.  Trade with someone else the stuff you didn't like as well.  When we were kids, my sister and I put at least a few pieces in the freezer and most of the rest in the fridge.a To this day I love cold chocolate.  We were generous children and shared our ill-gotten gains with our parents and grandmother.  There was plenty to go around.

And here it is again.  I have no idea what sort of turnout we will get.  Could be a lot.  Could be just a little.  But we are prepared regardless.  I won't be in costume.  But I will be passing out the goodies.  Generously.

Have a Safe and Happy Halloween!