A Tradition of Pointless Holidays

Originally published February 9, 2009

As some of you may have been aware last week we had the very strange holiday of Groundhog Day. If you’re like me you were unaware of this. I had forgotten about it until I read that the groundhog, Staten Island Chuck, had actually bitten mayor Bloomberg during the New York City Groundhog Day ceremony. Even though groundhogs’ habitat is not New York, Staten Island Chuck clearly has adopted the aggressive New Yorker attitude that makes it the greatest city in the world. I’m sure Groundhog Day provides much needed revenue to the town of Punxsutawney, and much needed publicity to the groundhog species, but it is an ultimately pointless celebration. Seeing a morbidly obese squirrel crawl out of a tiny hut and then having some guy interpret it as a weather prediction just seems wrong to me. Perhaps I’m not comfortable with the idea of a rodent oracle. We are turning groundhogs into false prophets, just like Pat Robertson. Perhaps in the 18^th century people really respected the prediction of groundhogs, but today it is obsolete and so are other holidays of ours.

Remember Earth Day, of course not. Oddly enough there are actually two earth days every year. One on the 22 of April and one on the vernal equinox, both are equally pointless. There may have been a time when we needed to devote a whole day to conservation, but ever since “An Inconvenient Truth” came out everyday is earth day. Arbor Day is similar to earth day except it is more tree concentrated. I like trees as much as the next man, but growing up in suburban New York and Connecticut has desensitized me to their importance. Maybe if I grew up in a city or a desert I would feel some sense of novelty, but being around huge forests since birth has made me indifferent. Instead of being a symbol of life and nature, to me trees are just the things outside of my house that cause power failures periodically.

Valentine’s day is not pointless, but it seriously needs to be changed so it doesn’t make single people like me want to kill themselves. Throughout the first half of February I constantly see commercials about giving chocolates, flowers, and jewelry to a significant other. Every time I see one of these commercials it reminds me to get a bottle of vodka as a Valentine’s gift for myself. I have to imagine that as well as jewelry and candy companies do on this holiday, liquor companies are also comparably successful.

So we may have a slew of ridiculous holidays, but at least some of them give us days off from work. I would have spoken about Columbus Day earlier in this article, but that holiday has a point. Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic ocean with the very noble intention of giving us a day off in October.