Happy holiday!.
If I have these holidays right, there was some guy named Santa Claus who was born one December in a barn and who celebrated his birthday by riding a sleigh powered by a team of flying reindeer, giving presents to good children of Christian families, saving the best presents for the children of the more affluent families.
He became very unpopular with some people and they had him executed one spring by crucifying him on an evergreen tree, but he came back to life as a rabbit who passed out eggs and chocolate and went back to flying that sleigh.
Today is
It was also the day when Mama D served her free dinner for the poor, although she only made it to St. Patrick’s Day this time.
But for the last six years it has also been the anniversary [
So rest well, Mama D and rest well, all of our unnecessary war victims [Iraqi, American, and others].
The birds will still fly.
This weekend we will be doing our semiannual clock change. If most of us do it as we usually do, we will do it without really asking ourselves any questions about why we do so. We will do so because Congress and our state have told us to. We will not ask ourselves whether we are damaging our own internal clocks. One of the reasons we are given for the change is to save energy which we are told will help us stave off a national crisis. We do not even ask if there might not be possible savings in petroleum if some of us made the switch and others not, although it would seem that staggered travel hours would hint at that. [Since we have already given up so much of our individual prerogatives to accommodate national crises – real or suggested -- is it no surprise that our congresspeople cave in leading us in walking in an orderly line on this?]
We Americans have always prided ourselves on our individual independence, on the each person for his/herself attitude which led our ancestors to cross the oceans, level the forests, settle the woods and prairies, and develop what was the world’s most free and prosperous society.
But on something so basic as where we set our watches [if we still have watches] we exercise no individuality and demonstrate no resistance at all.
This is true for individuals and organizations also. My employer will change my work schedule to match the government changes. I do not know whether my boss has just never thought about the matter or [more likely] dismissed the idea quickly figuring that exercising independence would probably be more confusing than the resulting sensation of independence and defiance would warrant.
When I was a lot younger I worked for a summer in a creamery where our day was somewhat dictated by when the milk trucks could get the milk to us and the trucks were at least somewhat influenced by the milking schedules of cows. It would have seemed like a natural place to leave clocks unchanged in the spring, but even it did not do so and we often had to work late for the last truck to arrive and the milk to be processed.
But each year I still hope to see a story somewhere about some person or company deciding to exercise a little individualism. Something about it would send a secret, quasi-patriotic thrill along my back and put a little warmth in my heart.
To many people this is
By coincidence or whatever, today is also the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin.
This is October 31. In addition to its being the end of the month, it marks something called Halloween. When I was a child about half a century ago, I used to go freeloading with my little brother. We probably hit every house in an area of about a quarter mile and brought home a lot of calorie-laden food. We never thought twice about it. We never questioned the safety of the food. We never asked ourselves why would people we did not know or only knew vaguely would be all ready and apparently happy to give us candy or other treats. And when we found the occasional person who was not participating, we somehow felt that we were being deprived of something to which we were entitled. [And we somehow resented that our neighbors, almost all of whom attended Catholic school, would get the next day off and got to eat their stuff sooner.]
stormed the Bastille. This commemoration of this event has become the great national holiday of the Franco-American relations have generally been good, although there have been rough spots. But
But if we see anybody French today maybe we wish him/her a happy holiday. And if you have a copy of ‘La Marseilles” on tape, IPod, CD, or whatever, you might want to play it. It really is a good piece to serve as a national anthem.
Now that our railroad and trucking industries have largely forgotten us and moved pretty much anything they can away, we sometimes forget that the river [or more accurately the boats that moved upon it] made our city and helped establish the city as a major transportation hub.
Quote of the Day – April 4, 2008
If I have these holidays right, there was some guy named Santa Claus who was born one December in a barn and who celebrated his birthday by riding a sleigh powered by a team of flying reindeer, giving presents to good children of Christian families, saving the best presents for the children of the more affluent families. He became very unpopular with some people and they had him executed one spring by crucifying him on an evergreen tree, but he came back to life as a rabbit who passed out eggs and chocolate and went back to flying that sleigh.
Tomorrow is the day that only comes quadrennially, February 29th.
Answers
1. Gerald Ford [born Leslie Lynch King, jr.]
2. Zachary Taylor
Noted in a posting from Joe Kimball on Minnpost: The pope has moved St. Patrick’s Day to March 15th because March 17th comes during Holy Week.
I’m not Catholic but I assume that it is within the pope’s realm of authority to move holy days, but I wonder why one would move a holy day out of a holy week. But what authority does the pope have on when non-Catholics celebrate anything. [For that matter, the pope’s lack of real authority on Catholics is made evident every day as dissidents assault his teaching on birth control, abortion, war and peace, capital punishment, and other things.]
The authorities in charge of our local parade have deferred to His Holiness. The parade will occur on the Ides of March. [Somehow the idea of some kind of cross-promotion here has to be come up, but I don’t have any real ideas yet. Brutus wasn't Irish, but maybe we can do something.]
But won’t the real celebrators just find this an excuse to make the whole thing a three-day spree?
And if Monday the 17th is in Holy Week, so is Wednesday the 19th. So do we move
WARNING: This is a ramble. Today marks the forty-fourth anniversary of the close of a weekend that probably anybody over fifty won’t forget, the weekend that Presdient Kennedy was killed, mourned, paraded, and buried.
I’m not sure what makes the people in mainstream media choose what is newsworthy and how much to focus on something, but it seems that this year there was little attention given to the anniversaries.
November 22, 1963 shares a lot with September 11, 2001.
In 1963 the nation was steeped in the post-war idea that we were a strong and invincible country, that our only real enemies were the Communists and their sympathizers among us. We thought we were entering on a new era with a young president, the first one born in the twentieth century.
In 2001 we were beginning a whole new century. We still felt the euphoria of the end of the Cold War. We knew that we had some discontent in the country, but nobody took that seriously.
We all woke up on both of those days. And those who were old enough will never forget where they were or what they were doing when they learned about them. [Personally, I was in high school American History class when the word that JFK was shot was put on the school intercom and at home listening to Barbara Carlson when I heard her saying that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I thought she meant the one downtown, so I turned on my television to see if one of the local stations had any video. I got a surprise.]
On November 25, 1963 people all across the nation were watching their televisions. Most people only had affiliates of major networks available to them and the major networks had shown nothing but news and commentaries [no commercials] related to JFK or the new president, Mr. Johnson and what might happen in the future. The television and other media had crowded the Dallas Police Department headquarters and we had seen Oswald moved from room to room several times, protesting his innocence to all the cameras and reporters present. On Sunday the 24th with the whole country watching he was killed. Talk of conspiracy has gone on ever since and probably will never stop. The 29th century version of the History Channel on whatever the 29th century replacement we have for television will probably still be asking questions about it.
There was a late morning memorial service in the city I lived in at a theater downtown and my brother and I went to it. [School was canceled almost every place in the country.] We heard the various civic leaders and clergymen from almost all of the big religious traditions speak or pray about how it shouldn’t have happened.
When we got back home we saw the conclusion of the funeral and the burial at
But later on November 25 things started to get back to normal. After the funeral regular programming and commercials resumed and our teachers tried to find ways to get back to us the day of learning they seemed to feel that we had lost. Actually, I had learned a lot.
On this anniversary of the Kennedy burial, it does us well to remember all of our national traumas, to think about their similarities and differences, and learn from them.
Eighty-nine years ago the “War to End All Wars” came to an end with an armistice on November 11. Anniversaries came to be known as “Armistice Day.”
to.
Even to a war opponent like I was, it seemed strange. After all, the
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