Holidays By Design
Have you noticed how the major holidays (4th of July, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas) all morph into each other with no definitive lines of separation?
We get bombarded with ads convincing us we have to buy the latest gadget or special onetime offer months before the holiday they’re promoting is due.
June has become 4th of July; August is Labor Day; late August and September is Halloween and October is both Thanksgiving and Christmas.
This has to confuse the human psyche and add pressure and stress on breadwinners struggling to get it all done before the holiday arrives.
It certainly makes kids crazy and in turn makes parents crazy because they hear the constant cry for a favorite toy, communications gadget, or the latest in fashion and music day in and day out for two months or more before the holiday itself.
This all reminds me of the commercial with the little pig crying weee weee all the way home—annoying as all get out, right?
Why do we need to be pressured to buy things early and then are expected to wait in long lines to buy even more the day after Thanksgiving and New Year?
The day after Thanksgiving should be a day of letting all that turkey and dressing and pies work its way through your system and not be caught up in the frenzy of spending money and getting shoved and pushed all over the place—which is bound to make us impatient and lose our tempers—and the day after New Year should be a quiet time of reflection and dedication to make ourselves better in the coming year.
I just think all holidays should be in the month they were designed to be acknowledged so that we can enjoy them for what they mean.
And besides, we don’t make enough money to shop the way we’d like to, yet at the same time a large percentage of the items we chase are made in China, India, Indonesia, etc. and represent jobs that were shipped to these locations by some of the same corporations pressuring us to go out and spend, spend, spend.
I didn’t travel over the Thanksgiving holiday and haven’t heard of any drastic behavior occurring at the airport about scanning and pat downs.
When we complain like this, aren’t we giving the enemy ammunition to be used against us and to help them more easily board one of our planes with deadly contraband? Why do we gripe and complain about measures that are necessary to keep us safe?….I’m just saying
On the home front…Ted, I absolutely love your solution for solving Jasper County’s problem with elected officials not getting down to the heart of the matter and solving the issues that plague us. That suggestion is brilliant!
I want to share the following with each of you:
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.
“Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of reality.” —Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.