"Today, Wikipedia informs me, is World Thyroid Day, …"

My friend Franklin recently recounted his family's Mother's Day fiasco. They'd intended to do brunch at a fine Italian restaurant, but arrived to learn that they'd already sold out of everything Franklin's lovely wife Monica wanted, so they went strolling around the neighborhood, figuring a second best would quickly appear. Every place was booked solid with reservations. They finally settled for a seventies-era steak house where they served Corn Chex® as salad croutons. Monica teaches people how to cook like their grandmothers cooked and reviles "cereal" like Corn Chex® as the embodiment of everything evil with the industrial food system. Happy Mother's Day anyway!

Franklin reported that HallMark®Holidays seem to be the most troublesome ones. He admits that they're trumped up, like Mother's Day, which was apparently concocted by President Wilson and Black Jack Pershing as a morale booster during World War One. It stuck, becoming a secular holy obligation over subsequent years. Forgetting Mother's Day, failing to properly honor thy mother on that day, became an impeachable offense. Mothers could legally mope if not properly appreciated, and nobody ever wants a moping mother on their hands, so the greeting card companies and candy companies, hell, even the heating and air conditioning companies offered special deals guaranteed (well, warranted) to make her special day special enough; the odd, occasional Corn Chex® crouton notwithstanding.

I'd always write a poem for my mother on Mother's Day, which makes me no better or worse than anyone purchasing a new air conditioning unit to commemorate the "holiday". We have real holidays without resorting to too awfully many trumped up ones. My mother's birthday came two weeks after Mother's Day, so May became Mother's Month in our household. Father's Day was somehow less sacred, more secular, and could be adequately celebrated by watching a baseball game and mowing lawn with only a minimum of grousing. Halloween might have grown to become the mother of all Hallmark®Holidays since it seems to coerce even the sugar averse into a vast commercial conspiracy to prop up candy companies while scaring the crap out of our fellow man. What a concept!

I could say that Christmas is a Hallmark®Holiday, but only if I'm willing to tolerate considerable blowback. I understand that Christmas pre-dates the Hallmark® Company, though it's now become probably their single largest holiday, greeting card-wise. Birthdays needn't ever be Hallmark®Holidays, a cake will do for those. Every day is somebody's Hallmark®Holiday. Today, Wikipedia informs me, is World Thyroid Day, also African Liberation Day, Geek Pride Day, and International Missing Children's Day. (I doubt that Hallmark® makes a card for that last one.) Today is also The Muse and my wedding anniversary, a definite holiday enough for The Muse to take the day off work to celebrate. It was a fine wedding and it's been a wonderful life so far, celebrated without the dubious benefit of The Hallmark® Greeting Card Company of Kansas City, Missouri, thank you very much.

©2018 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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