It’s probably just as well that the Broncos are not going to Super Bowl XL. I don’t know about you, but there’s only so long that I can tolerate every Denver newscaster trying out for head cheerleader, and I get tired of reading about everything from the daily growth rate of Jake Plummer’s beard to the devout fans in Backwater Springs who infected their children with jaundice to turn them orange before dying their hair blue and trotting them out for photographers.
But there’s a bigger issue here: If the Broncos had defeated the Steelers Sunday, then there would be another fortnight of rah-rah while normal business got put on hold.
And we’ve had too much of that recently, without any assistance from the National Football League. In a recent calendar interval, three out of four Mondays were legal holidays: Dec. 26, since Christmas fell on a Sunday; Jan. 2, since New Year’s Day likewise came on a Monday; and Jan. 16, Martin Luther King Day, celebrated on a Monday although he was born on Jan. 15, 1929.
Soon will come George Washington’s birthday, celebrated on the third Monday in February even though that can never be the anniversary of his birth on Feb. 22, 1732 (by our current Gregorian calendar). Then there aren’t any official holidays until Memorial Day in May.
Since I’m self-employed, I don’t get paid holidays. Further, if I take a day off, the work just piles up. It isn’t as though a holiday means any less work. It just means that it’s harder to get my work done when any office I might call is closed.
Granted, I’m in a small minority. But even people who love holidays would likely prefer that they were more spread out.
So let’s consider moving some of them. King Day is the most recent, and the Rev. Martin Luther King is not famous for having been born. It’s what he did that was important. Alas, most of those significant events, just like his birthday, are close to other holidays. The Montgomery bus boycott, which brought him to prominence, began on Dec. 1, 1955, right after Thanksgiving, and his “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered on Aug. 28, 1963, just before Labor Day.
The date of his assassination, April 4, 1968, comes at an opportune time for a holiday, but that’s not an event to celebrate. So we really can’t move it. And we need to keep it because we all need to remember Dr. King – not just for his leadership in bringing our nation closer to its ideals, but also because he showed that it was possible to lead a productive life while being wiretapped by our government, and that’s something we all will need to know under the regime of Bush the Younger.
How about Christmas? It celebrates the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, which almost certainly did not happen on Dec. 25. That date derives more from the pagan Roman festival of Saturn than from anything Christian. Scholars point out that shepherds would not have been out with their flocks in the winter when the fields were brown with no grass to graze, and some students point to late September as the most probable time.
So we could move Christmas to the last Monday in September. Not only would it fit the biblical account better, but holiday travel would be much easier if it happened before the arrival of heavy snow and bitter cold. However, that would create a cluster with Labor Day and Columbus Day, and so this is not an optimal solution.
As for New Year’s Day, it was on March 25 back when George Washington was born; not until 1752 did England (and its colonies) move it to Jan. 1. The March tradition dates to the Romans, who began their year in March (that’s why September means “seventh month,” October “eighth month,” etc.). It’s near the vernal equinox, and the start of spring is certainly a better time to commence a year than the dead of winter.
Further, there are no official holidays in March, so we would spread out the celebrations while reducing the January cluster.
Or even better, people should just take time off when they want or need time off, and forget the whole notion of trying to make everybody fit on the same bizarre holiday schedule we have now.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
