Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.
May 4th is the unofficial Star Wars Day. (May the Fourth be with you.) What other days should be recognized as holidays but aren’t?
Well, this topic’s a bit left field. Not at all what I was expecting to be writing about this week. At least it isn’t more of my thoughts on lockdown. I’m fed up with regurgitating them. Perhaps we should have a holiday from lockdown. We could all go somewhere nice.
I guess that I may as well throw some random thoughts out, see what connects.
This post may well be even more confusing than my normal ramblings.
In some ways I’m very young, in others very old. I can still get excited because it’s Friday, or my birthday (now there’s a day worth celebrating) and also feel joy when I wake up to a new day, any day.
Because it means that I’m still here.
Ok, what’s a holiday? Wikipedia says,
A holiday is a day set aside by custom or by law on which normal activities, especially business or work including school, are suspended or reduced. Generally, holidays are intended to allow individuals to celebrate or commemorate an event or tradition of cultural or religious significance.
But I don’t really think that’s what the question means, May 4th is a play on words, a cause for celebration among the faithful. It wasn’t even the day the first film came out (May 25th 1977, since you asked). George missed a trick there.
So, should the question really be what events should we celebrate with a special day?
I found a few interesting days when I was researching, mainly at this website
Days like Old Rock Day (the geology not the music), on Jan 7th. Did you know that 11th February was Don’t Cry Over Spilled Milk Day? Apparently, 10th June will be Ball Point Pen Day.
Neither did I. But on a personal level, we could have We had an Amazon delivery day, or my neighbours spent six hours arguing day. I guess everyone has them or ones like them.
In world history, there are a few special days, the ones when something so incredible, so shocking or marvellous or terrible happened that everyone knows where they were. That’s what makes them special, worth remembering every year. They may be anniversaries, but they are not generally holidays.
I see anniversaries in two ways. On a personal level, they mark the achievements and sadness of our lives, hatch, match and dispatch if you like. Whereas on a larger level, say in a town tor a country, even the world, they create a sense of shared belonging, of the passage towards a better (or worse) civilisation.
If every day was a holiday, would we ever get anything done? Wouldn’t it reduce the impact of a day that you had to wait for, feel that you had earned and deserved?
If every day was a holiday, wouldn’t it defeat the object. If we added too many, wouldn’t we just get to the point where every day was a cause to celebrate?
Then we are surely back to where we started, every day you wake up is a reason to be happy. And if its 7th August (which is my wedding anniversary), then we should also celebrate Particularly Preposterous Packaging Day with gusto!!
Well done if you managed to make it this far through my disjointed thoughts. Now let me know what you think.
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Stevie Turner
Your neighbours spent 6 hours arguing? That was a fun day! We used to have a ‘My neighbours spent all day and night partying’ day when we lived in South London back in the 1980s. When they eventually slept, Sam would drill a piece of concrete on the other side of their bedroom wall. One day while he drilled off his anger for a couple of hours he thought up a way to make a device which when he switched it on, would interfere with their stereo. It worked! They took it away to be repaired and we had a temporary reprieve.
Richard Dee
We’ve lived in some strange places. We once lived next door to people who used to come home from the pub at 23:30 and try to train their puppy in the back garden. Not sure we need a day for that!!
P.J. Maclayne
Ball Point Pen Day? That sounds like one every writer should embrace!
Richard Dee
I could do with fixing plot hole day or making my characters behave day!
Lela Markham
I have personally reached my limit of hunkering down (the Alaska term for CVD19 lockdown). Holidays feel like a day when you have even less to do than ordinary days. I am at least getting a lot of writing done amid teleworking, but I have friends who are saying they no longer look forward to the projects they used to do at home.
So, yes, a holiday from lockdown sounds lovely.
Richard Dee
As an introvert, I’m not too bothered, although I can see how others are being affected. As the father of a nurse working ITU shifts, I can also see the danger of relaxing too soon.
Roberta Eaton Cheadle
I think we are all a bit sick of lockdown. I would be okay with it except some of the rules are illogical. I can’t visit my elderly aunt at her own home and I can’t visit my sisters, but I can go to a shopping mall and stand in a huge queue to purchase winter clothing. I makes no sense at all and it feels abusive. We have more than enough holidays in South Africa. Here, any excuse not to work is grabbed and our national productivity is very low. At my firm, there are about 10% of the employees that do about 70% of the work and never get any proper time off. It is a weird system. When I deal with the UK, I am delighted at the work ethic of the people I deal with. They are all hard working and driven.
Richard Dee
I guess its the trouble with making rules in a changing situation, there are always anomalies. It’s the same here, I worked with a person who would spend several hours getting out of thirty minutes work. Personally, if a job needs doing, I’ll do it straight away.