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Sunday Monkey Day Posting Date: Nov 25 2007 1:42PM This past Thursday was Thanksgiving in the United States. As far as I can tell from the outside looking in, Thanksgiving seems like a worthy American holiday. The best part is that it always happens on a Thursday which means that no one ever works the Friday, so one holiday effectively becomes two. I support that. I think every holiday should be on a Thursday, or possibly a Tuesday, for this exact reason.
Back home in Ontario, the newly re-elected government rode back to power on the promise of a new holiday, Family Day, in the middle of otherwise crappy February.
This seems odd to me. Holidays don’t just spring out of a desire to have a day off like some make-believe food poisoning. Holidays come from events of historical importance. Even the relative newcomers on the holiday scene like Canada Day, Remembrance Day and Victoria Day have their roots in events that shape either our history books or the queen’s social calendar. Older holidays like Hallowe’en trace their roots to festivals tied to the timelessness of the seasons. And then there are the granddaddies of them all – Christmas, which started in the year zero A.D., and New Year’s Day which goes all the way back to the first Rose Bowl.
With all that in mind, I started feeling a little guilty about the shiny, disingenuous freshness of Family Day, so I did a little research on worldwide holidays. Turns out new holidays are standard operating procedure. Take Afghanistan, for example. If ever a country needed a day of peace and joy, contemporary Afghanistan is it, so the nation’s leaders stepped up in 2007 and declared February 15th a new national holiday. Of course it celebrates the victory of the mujahideen over the Soviet army in 1989, and, by extension, celebrates the covert American support of guerrillas who, twenty years later, are using all the CIA’s tricks to hide Osama bin Laden from the, well, from the CIA, but I digress.
Afghanistan isn’t alone in celebrating newly-minted holidays. Algeria marks something called Arafat Day, so you know that can’t exactly be a timeless tradition, and I’m going way out on a limb to say that August 7th in St. Kitts and Nevis has not forever been Culturama Day.
This isn’t the only thing you learn by looking at global holidays. You also learn that Aaland is a Swedish-speaking, autonomous area of Finland that makes a big deal out something called Vappu which gets celebrated over several days and often involves picnics. The Falkland Islands observe Peat Cutting Day and Norfolk Island celebrates Show Day. The day after is Tell Day.
Within Canada, Newfoundland is the undisputed leader of idiosyncratic holidays including Discovery Day, Orangemen’s Day, Regatta Day and Bowling League Day.
Internationally, I’m going to have to consult a theologian to explain to me why Christmas in on December 25th, but in countries like Argentina, Austria, Liechtenstein and The Vatican – which should know – Immaculate Conception day is December 8th. Either the baby Jesus was born well ahead of schedule, or he was one very large child.
Growing up, I often thought it would be cool if my birthday fell on a holiday. Apparently, it does. My birthday is, fittingly enough, Children’s Day in Angola, Laos and Mongolia. In Cape Verde, it’s Youth Day. Somoa marks the occasion with Independence Day while it’s Labour Day in the Bahamas. In Palau it’s President’s Day and in Indonesia it’s Buddha Day. In Kenya, where they give holidays for Easter, Christmas and Ramadan, it’s the ever popular Madaraka Day.
Since my birthday is obviously well-observed by the global community, it’s now my goal to fill one of the few unobserved days each year with a unique holiday. Somewhere in the world, every day on the calendar but for eight is a holiday, so I’m going to claim the otherwise unobserved March 13th for my own. That day is the (not quite) anniversary of the first posting at sundaymonkey.ca, so I proclaim March 13th to be Sunday Monkey Day … in Aaland. It’s going to be a big festival, complete with picnics and a giant peat cutting display. |
