Tag Holidays

Happy Holidays

Michael 4 Comments

Today in the USA it is Columbus Day. That’s what it says in the Federal Register. Americans being Americans can’t let anything happen without controversy so the holiday named for a man who never set foot on North American soil is called by a few other names so we aren’t honoring the man who forcibly conquered entire populations of people who were here when he never set foot on American soil. But that’s a different post for a different day. Today’s post is just to wish you a happy day because for 99.7% of us, that’s all we’re gonna get.

The United States of America has 11 federal holidays. Proposals are floating around Washington to approve 7 more. And there are a handful of days (Armed Forces Day Inauguration Day, and others) which grant federal employees days off but have not been elevate to the rank of “Holiday.” Not that it would matter. There is a law on the books that says the federal government cannot force any state to observe a federal holiday and it cannot prevent any state from declaring its own holiday(s). I guess that’s the technical difference between a federal holiday and a national holiday.

Of those 18 holidays, only 7 are actually fixed days that commemorate something that happened that day either by history or tradition. Five of the approved holidays – New Years, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Veterans Day, and Christmas) are celebrated the same day every year. Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday of November regardless of date (likely to make the scheduling for Black Friday easier). Two of the six holidays that float so they will always result in 3 day weekends supposedly commemorate peoples’ birthdays (Martin Luther King, Jr. and George Washington) and you’d think if we were celebrating birthdays we’d celebrate it on the birthday date, but…well. Americans. What can I say?

Those floating days are important to the narrative here so let’s keep them, and 5 of the proposed 7 federal holidays that may join their ranks, in mind. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act (yeah, that’s what it’s called) of 1968 was enacted to create more three day weekend opportunities for employees. That’s about it. Oh and that’s the act that made Columbus Day an official federal holiday, so it instituted 2 things of controversy with one law. (Originally Veterans Day was also assigned to a floating Monday but reverted to November 11 in 1978.) Those federal employees are important here now too. Let’s keep them in mind now.

So, if you are a federal employee, Happy Columbus Day. Enjoy your day off.  Everybody else. Get back to work. Congress only has the power to enact federal holidays and grant days off, premium pay, or any other perk of the law for employees of federal institutions. Everybody else. Sorry. Unless you have a really generous boss, no law gives you those days off. Nope. It’s not one of your rights either. Generally, since the 1970s most business still conduct business on almost every day of the year.

If you’re like me and have always worked in hospitals or organized health care settings, emergency services, or some entertainment fields, every day, whether weekday, Saturday , Sunday, or holiday, could be a day of work. Some banks and schools celebrate every holiday and then some and might have more than just those extra 11 days off. But for many, holidays today are not like the holidays of the past. Few people experience days off or holiday celebrations for more than for New Years, Independence Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas. Which incidentally were the first four recognized federal holidays. You know what? Maybe that just about right.

So allow me to wish you a happy day. Even if you don’t want to call it anything!

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No, not yet

Michael Leave a comment

Across the USA and Canada, billions of people are celebrating Labor and or Labour Day. So there are probably millions of bloggers publishing the collective histories of the holidays. (Do you suppose there was some collusion that two countries came up with the same holiday within months of each other? It couldn’t have been coincidence, could it?) The few who don’t believe in organized labor but are more than happy to take the extra day off – with pay even – are celebrating the last day of summer. Now you see, that’s the one I don’t believe in.

Blog ArtFor as long as I can remember, which stretches back almost to halfway through the last century, Memorial Day has always been the “unofficial start of summer” and Labor Day its “unofficial ” end. Even the meteorologists get in on it, calling September 1 the start of Meteorologic Fall. According to my calendar, Fall doesn’t happen until the 22d day of this month and September 1 was National Tofu Day.

Yes I firmly believe Labor Day is NOT the end of summer. We might have furniture sales, we may frown on wearing white, and the pools might be closed, but the sun is still high in the sky, leaves are still high in the trees, and daytime temperatures are high enough to threaten heat stroke. That last point will be made several times, no, several thousand times over as high school and college athletes fall to the ground under the stifling weight and closeness of helmets and other protective gear in heat related injuries requiring no opponent contact, and marching band musicians and performers will do likewise in their often plumage featured uniforms designed for the coolness of autumn and the coldness of winter, football being a fall sport that often stretches into the still next season. We may not wear white but delivery and parcel service drivers everywhere will still be wearing short pants, and female TV news anchors won’t be giving up their sleeveless tops just yet. The pools and water parks might close but the lakes and swimming holes are still in business.

No, Labor Day is NOT the end of summer. We might be inundated with pumpkin spice everything and the food magazines may be featuring desserts with the classic fall warming spices, but in the backyard gardens the pumpkins are still only softball size on their vines next to the ripening tomato plants, loaded pepper plants, and never ending zucchini vines. Yard care still requires a lawn mower while the leaf rake and blowers stay hung on their hooks in the backyard garden sheds. Apple cider flavored donut holes may be featured in bakeries but cider presses are still idle waiting for the featured ingredient to ripen naturally.

So…Labor Day is the end of summer? Uh, no, not yet. Once again man makes up some oddball “rule”and then wonders why nature won’t follow suit. Well for me, I’m sticking with Mother Nature. Labor Day is NOT the end of summer. Stay tuned though. In a little less than a month you can consider having that tune up done on your snow blower. 

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Revisiting the Middle Seat

Michael 4 Comments

Back in July of 2020, July 9 to be exact, I published “The Middle Seat Hump Syndrome,” a clever little ditty if I say so myself wherein I compared the then fairly new encounter with the coronavirus, which we don’t even call it that any more. Toward the end of an honest to gosh true tale of summer family vacationing, I said with much assurance that we will all be fine in the long run. Guess what? I was right! Politicians, social media “experts” in-laws, naysayers, leftist, rightists, centrists all aside, I was right! We are pretty much okay as long as you don’t ask the 6.35 million people who lost their lives. Yes that number could have been smaller had we paid less attention to the politicians, social media “experts” in-laws, naysayers, leftist, rightists, but we’re stupid so we didn’t. Maybe next time we will.

Because today is the Fourth of July, which of course everybody knows is officially American Independence Day, and because the entire country is out there burning gas we don’t have to pursue their right to a family vacation, I thought I’d regale you again, with “The Middle Seat Hump Sydrome,” with that pesky typo corrected even!

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You need to be of a certain age to remember summer vacations in the family car with enough family that it filled all the seats, three across, and the middle seat made the leg room in coach on Delta look generous for there, right where your feet wanted to be, was “the hump,” the growth in the floorboard that rose nearly to seat level, to allow whatever it was that transferred the up and downs of the engine to the round and round of the rear wheels to make it’s way from the motor to the where the rubber met the road. I am of that age and had been on those vacations and I got that middle seat.

It wasn’t always like that. For a while there were just two of us in the back and we would each get out own window seats with plenty of room between for the picnic basket and cooler that were only opened at planned stops along the way. Then the third one came along. At first it wasn’t such a big deal. She started out in the baby seat in the middle of the front seat (yes, that’s where we put them when we used them back then). After she outgrew that space, she shifted to the back but because those short, stubby legs didn’t even make it off the seat, the hump was not impediment to her comfort. Eventually though, she grew and with that, so did the complaining. “I don’t want to sit on the hump!” And the word came from the front, “take turns.” From then on, whenever the car stopped, the back seat crowd reshuffled, and everyone got a turn being uncomfortable where we decidedly didn’t want to be.

That’s a little like what’s going on in the world now. Each time it appears to be stopping, or at least slowing enough to risk opening the door and get off this crazy ride, the virus comes back, and we have to reshuffle. Do we limit contact, should we close down again, does this mask make my nose look big? Regardless of the answer, some bodies are going to end up decidedly where they don’t want to be doing what they’d rather not be doing or not doing what they’d rather do. Think of the world as an early ’64 Chevrolet and were all taking turns sitting on the hump.

I’m going to spoil the ending for you. It all works out. Nobody was permanently damaged from sitting with a leg there and the other one there. We climbed out of the backseat a little stiff and a little sore but we made. We’ll make it through this also. Maybe a little worse for the wear after this ride that you are certain we got lost on because no way it should be taking this long, but eventually we are going to climb back out into the world.

Middle seat hump syndrome was never that horrible and may have been the inspiration for some future engineer to design SUVs with higher cabins that clear all those mechanical doodads or to shift the driving wheels to the front and obviate the need for a hump running down the middle if the cars interior. Along those same lines it could be someday we might even get to go out and not have to check that we have our masks with us. We just have to wait for the right expert to come up with the right solution. They are out there. There will find it.

In the meanwhile, Happy Motoring!

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I’ll have mine with coffee please

Michael 2 Comments

This is the day sweet toothed snackers and pastry enthusiasts wait for every year – Pi Day, or as probably a large percentage of those pie eaters would write it out, and for as much as they care of its significance – Pie Day. Now that opens a whole new line of thought. Exactly what does pi actually do in the real world? And while we’re at it, why pi?

That second question is easier to answer. Everybody, even those insisting on it being Pie Day, knows pi (without the ‘e’) has something to do with math and some of those everybodies might even know it’s most closely associated with circles. Pi is the relationship of a circle’s, any circle’s circumference to its diameter. There’s a great two-minute video here that demonstrates that with a touch of humor and extra pepperoni. Although the concept of pi (again, without the ‘e’) was first demonstrated in the third century B.C., it wasn’t until 1706 on this side of the Common Era dividing line that British mathematician William Jones decided the Greek letter and symbol would make a dandy stand in for 3.14 etc.etc.etc. in calculations. But Leonhard Euler (yes, the is THE Euler) made it popular in his textbooks and justified the Greek Pi, corresponding to P, because pi is all about the perimeter (or circumference) of a circle. (In case you’re wondering, pie (with the ‘e’) has been around since about 6,000 B.C..)

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Now the first question isn’t actually hard to answer. It is hard to pin it down to less than a few hundred dozen applications that are possible only because somebody, sometime, somewhere worked out the calculations to make whatever it is work, using pi. These include radio waves that not only make AM radio possible, but blue tooth that is powering those high priced ear buds you have sitting on your desk.  Not straying too far from there, the GPS function of your phone wouldn’t be possible today if some engineer hadn’t tossed pi into an equation or three. And just that you can talk to your phone or home assistant is possible because voice recognition schemes all use pi to calculate and translate vocal waveforms into computerese. But, you ask, what can you do with it?

If you so wanted to, you could use pi to calculate how much water it takes to fill the kid’s backyard swimming pool, how much stain you need to cover the floor of the gazebo, or how much frosting to make to adequately decorate the surprise party birthday cake. Even more practical is determining what size electrical conduit to buy for that remodel you’re DIY-ing, or how much pie filling you need for the deep dish apple pie the kids are expecting after dinner. Yes, I know, there are charts and recipes for all these things. But now you know you could calculate the answer if all the computers in the world suddenly stopped working or worse, decided to take over and not talk to us anymore. Not too far-fetched you know. Didn’t you ever see “Colossus: The Forbin Project?” (Or one not so evil, like EMARAC from “Desk Set.” If the computers are going to take over, that’s the one I want, as long as Ms. Warriner comes with it.)

So now, go off and eat your pie today, today being Pi Day, or Pie Day if you must. And remember, ask not what pi can do for you, ask if you get whipped cream with it!

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I remember…

Michael 5 Comments

Oh we are so very close. Just a couple days separate us from Christmas which means it’s well past time for a Christmas movie post.

I didn’t talk about Christmas movies last year. We were too busy praying. Actually, one can never be too busy praying but last year I put the prayer out in public. But this year, let’s talk movies again.

I’ve visited this subject four time before, the most recent from 2019 when I revealed my then current favorite Christmas movie. At the time I said, “I say my current favorite because like children there can be no real favorite among Christmas movies. The favorite is the one making you smile today or remember yesterday, the one encouraging a perfect alternative to an imperfect world and providing an escape from the ordinary.” I stand by that thought still. There can be no favorite among the 873 bazillion holiday film offerings, even if only a handful are truly good movies. If they make you feel good, then they are. Except Die Hard. It isn’t, it never was, it never will be, end of discussion, period. (And it’s not a western either even though the main character does say, “Yippee ki yay.”)

When you get down to it, almost any of our favorite “Christmas movies” can be reworked to be set in some other month, some other season, with some other set decorations, and would play just as well. Maybe we set the bar too low for what we expect of holiday film fare. Maybe we really need those classics that wouldn’t work any other time of the year. Ebeneezer Scrooge would not convey the same sense of repentance in August. A Christmas Carol is a Christmas movie.

My current favorite most likely would work any other time of the year. In fact, the basic story is released dozens of times every year, and I’m surprised Hallmark or Lifetime or whoever churns out a new Christmas story every evening between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve hasn’t lifted the very plot for one of theirs. My current favorite wasn’t even in the theaters at Christmas, its general release coming in mid-January although it had a Boston release on New Year’s Day. That’s not at all unusual. There are more Christmas movies released in the summer months than any other time. Many studios feel winter releases won’t generate the type of first weekend or first month income their investors demand. One of the greatest Christmas movies of all time, Miracle on 34th Street, was released in June, the classic White Christmas was released in October, and for the younger crowd, it was barely October when Elf arrived. However, you have to give credit to George Minter Productions who managed to get the definitive Christmas Carol starring Alastair Sim as Scrooge released on Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. in 1951. No, release date does not a Christmas movie make.

If you are to go by set decorations and locations, it would be difficult to call my current favorite a very Christmassy Christmas movie. The tree in the Poseidon Adventure gets more screen time and there are few, precious few, presents unwrapped. Most of the action is in a court room and there is one scene where our top credited stars milk a cow. Other than snippets of “Jingle Bells” heard occasionally, there is no Christmas music in a movie featuring a half dozen full songs. Appearances don’t seem to make a Christmas movie either.

So what does make a Christmas movie and why should my current favorite rank so high this year? It has the same unknown last year’s favorite has. Imperfect characters making imperfect plans, and ordinary people doing ordinary things while dealing with ordinary problems. Somehow, among all that mediocrity come glimpses of joy until the end when you find yourself smiling amid the improbability of a happily every after ever happening and the true desire to wish it could.

2021-12-22 (1)My current favorite Christmas movie is the 1940 production of “Remember the Night,” pairing Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck four years before they team up to become the couple you love to hate in “Double Indemnity.” Here they are the non-couple you want so badly to become the couple you love. All the printed synopses are blah. The story they describe isn’t the movie at all. I saw this movie years ago and promptly forgot about it. Maybe it was where I was in my life. Maybe I wasn’t looking for joy. I saw it in the summer and maybe the joy was there but lost in the stifling heat of July. I saw it again a few years ago at Christmas and fell in love with it. This year I can’t get enough of it. To me, it really is “a perfect alternative to an imperfect world.”

As I was doing some research for this post, I discovered it is #69 on Rotten Tomatoes list of top Christmas movies. There are any number of questionable offerings ranked higher, including their number 2, but at least Die Hard isn’t among them and that my friends, is this year’s true Christmas miracle!

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Watch “Remember the Night” trailer

A Prayer for Thanksgiving 2021

Michael 4 Comments

ThanksgivingPrayerI published the post below in 2017. The world has changed since but our feelings toward it seem about the same. That no specific events are mentioned may be why I can look at that today and not be surprised that it doesn’t intimate the world’s current events. I wonder if it would have been as appropriate in 1945 or will be relevant in 2067. I wasn’t here yet for the former and don’t expect to make it to the latter so I will concentrate on 2017 and 2021 and find we are still just as clueless. Pity.

So here is my tale and my prayer from 4 years ago. I will repeat the prayer a few times today. Hopefully I won’t forget to say it on some other days also. That would be the real pity.

Happy Thanksgiving – or maybe we start with just Happy Thursday. Non-holidays need prayers too.

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. It was or will be likewise around the world. Everybody is thankful for something and most nations have managed to work in a holiday to legitimize the feeling.

I don’t know how others do it but Americans have been managing to delegitimize feelings quite efficiently lately. We’ll tout our tolerance and claim to accept all and then slur anyone who doesn’t feel the same and blur want for welcome. We support everything and everyone as long as it or they support us in the manner to which we think we should be accustomed. Our gratitude for what we have is matched by our appetite for what we don’t.

Sometime today while I think of all that I am thankful for I’ll manage to miss most of them. So will everyone else. Mostly we’re not bad people as much as clueless ones. Clueless to the differences between our reality and the one that’s really out there. And clueless to how much we rely on what we don’t even know is happening.

So when you give your thanks today that hopefully you won’t restrict to just today I offer you the prayer I started today with.

Heavenly Father, this is the day set aside to give thanks for Your surpassing goodness to human beings. Let me give proper thanks for my blessings  –  those I am aware of as well as those that I habitually take for granted. And let me use them according to Your will.

Happy Thanksgiving today and every day you think to be thankful.

What’s your hurry?

Michael 7 Comments

[If you are reading this in your email, especially on a mobile device, the formatting may be a little wonky. It might be better in the browser. Just saying.]

Pull up a chair and don’t go anywhere. This is going to be short and sweet and I would hate for you to miss it. Short short – few words, lots of pictures. Well… three at least, maybe 4.

So now, today is August 26. We’re barely back in school, Labor Day is still 11 days away, Grandparents Day is the following Sunday, and then on October 11 we celebrate what we used to be content to call Columbus Day but now the name changes depending on who the Twitterati feel like honoring that year. The point is, there are three holidays between now and the annual fall excuse for pretend adults to get drunk while the kiddies OD on snack size chocolate bars, but those bars have been out along with décor, decorations, and orange and black barware.

You will notice the date on this actual screen shot is July 13 when there had already been enough ads released to do a comparison to find the best sales for this Halloween

Well, we’re used to Halloween candy hitting the grocery store shelves as soon as the Easter candy is put on clearance so that’s not so shocking. How about this one.

It happens every year, earlier and earlier, those dreaded three little words: Welcome back, pumpkin. Yes, it’s here and yes, that is the actual date and time it was on my scream, I mean screen.

Okay, I did say, it happens every year, so what’s to get excited about over a little pumpkin. How about a little turkey, as in Thanksgiving turkey as in…

… or should I have said as in Black Friday Eve turkey. Yes, Black Friday news is out. If you can’t read that posting date I’ll tell you it says

Thursday,19th August 2021 at 11:24am.

[Sigh]

So what else could there be on this the 26th of August, surely not, no, it can’t be. That’s four months! Is it possible?

Oh yeah, baby, it’s possible. How did I start? We’re barely back in school, Labor Day is still 11 days away.

That’s all I got. You can go now. But then, what’s your rush?

Making Beautiful Music Together

Michael 2 Comments

For some reason I was thinking of a time ago when my daughter was a teenager filling her after school day hours with after school activities. Two of those activities, or one with two arms perhaps, were concert band and marching band when she played flute and piccolo respectively. The thing about those particular winds is that, except for perhaps in the fingers of Ian Anderson, they rarely play much that by themselves would be recognizable as good music. While she would practice, I couldn’t be sure she was playing the right notes but during the performances, with the other winds, strings, and percussion, all the individual pieces came together to form true music. Every now and then an instrument might be featured in a solo but for far longer the group played ensemble to make the really good stuff.

In a sappy poetic way, America is like those bands. Alone, we don’t sound like much. We’re single instruments playing random notes that make little sense alone. If you put all the piccolos together, they still don’t make much musical sense, only now they make little sense louder. Likewise, groups of like-thinking individuals spouting the same lines make little sense even when making a lot of noise. No, it’s not the number of people that make the country, it’s the variety. It might not work for other countries and that’s fine, but for America to work, there have to be different voices, playing different parts of the same song.

Lately too many of us have been closing our ears to the other instruments that make up the American band. We’re content hearing only our own part, or worse, playing only solos. Then we question why others are thinking the same thing. Oddly, the others are wondering likewise, everybody convinced their part is the main part, that their idea is the right idea. Why won’t everybody think alike? It really isn’t a matter of why everybody won’t think or say or do the same things. It’s because we can’t. We can’t think the same things because we don’t have the same backgrounds to formulate those thoughts. No matter how hard a piccolo tries, it cannot reach the same notes as a tuba.

You can only listen to a tuba solo – or piccolo or sax or marimba – for so long before you get up and walk out on the concert. The strength of the band, the beauty of the music, is not in the instrument. It is in the players who know when to play their notes, trusting that by allowing the other musicians to play their own notes, they will make beautiful music together.

This Independence Day, take a moment to think about how our differences are what makes us unique as a country. Yes, celebrate those differences, but celebrate the whole also. The music sounds best when all the instruments are playing together. Celebrate this Independence Day and enjoy our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of really good harmony.

Happy Birthday America!

All In

Michael Leave a comment

Through thick and through thin, all out or all in
We’re gonna go through it together
With you for me and me for you
We’ll muddle through whatever we do
Together, wherever we go

June 8 is Best Friends Day. I don’t know about the rest of the world but when I think of “best friend” I think of that number. Keen eyed readers with keen ears and keen theater sense will recognize those lyrics from that number don’t go together which is pretty okey dokey. I mixed them up a bit because that’s how I sing them in the shower or wherever I am thinking about best friends and that’s okey dokey too because, all things considered, that musical isn’t about friendship.

The musical in question, of course, is “Gypsy,” the 1959 David Merrick stage production written by Arthur Laurents, and those lyrics came from the pen of Steven Sondheim. In the play, Rose, the prototypical stage mother wants to see her daughters become stars, and so she drags them through the Vaudeville circuit across America. Long story short, outgoing talented daughter sets out on her own, leaving mother and introverted less talented daughter to fail or succeed on their own, Vaudeville dies, the act ends up in burlesque, introvert becomes successful stripper sensation Gypsy Rose Lee, mother confides she always pushed them only so she could live vicariously through them but instead eventually loses them and in the end mother Rose and daughter Louise (Gypsy Rose) sort of, kind of reconcile.

A masterpiece of the theater. Over 700 performances, four Broadway revivals, one London revival, two movies, a Great Masterpieces performance, a triumph indeed, but not the thing of friendships. But that song! “We’ll muddle through.” whatever it takes. Now that’s the thing of friendship – best friends. Not good friends, not close friends, not even canine friends. Best friends. Best, best friends. Bestest friends!

Real best friends aren’t typical friends. They are not the best friends of childhood. You could have had a different best friend every week of summer then. They are not the best friends of a contract like married best friends. You might well be as close as best friends but you’re also there because you’ve formally committed to each other. They are not the best friends of circumstances perhaps of being together in the military, serving or fighting side by side until transfers or separation orders send them apart.

Best, best friends could walk away any time. They could leave or be transferred. They could hide out, remember an important meeting, or realize their tardiness somewhere else when a real need comes up. They could grow tired of each other after so many years together and move on, nothing legally holding them together. But they don’t. Whatever obstacles they face, best friends face together and muddle through, because they want to. Even when it’s hard. Sometimes seemingly especially when it’s hard.

I have a best friend. A best, best friend. A bestest best friend. We greet each other every morning, wish each other a good night at the end of each day. Always we find a way to communicate sometime in between, often many times in between in by texts, or calls, or videos, always there for each other. We know we’ll never move apart. We already live apart, 3,000 miles apart. How much farther apart could we be? Physically. Physically we have been in each other’s company four times in the last ten years, totally maybe 12 days. But we’ve been in each other’s company every day. Together. Wherever we go.

I wish you a best friend like that for Best Friends Day. There aren’t many. Only the bestest. I have mine and I’m all in!

Dedicated to my best friend.

And like I always say, you’re lucky.
Because, you don’t have to take it alone.
Wherever we go, whatever we do, We’re gonna go through it together.

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From Gypsy, the Musical, PBS Great Performances, November 11, 2016

Continuing with my experiment on the WordPress/Anchor partnership, Don’t Believe Everything You Think is available on these platforms.

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