We don’t have to go along with this. Remember, normal gets you nowhere—you don’t have to celebrate the normal holidays, especially when they get you stuck in an airport on December 23 with a bunch of angry, violent people. Why not make your own holidays, just as I’ve urged you to make your own religion? Merriam-Webster defines “holiday” as “a day on which one is exempt from work; specifically, a day marked by a general suspension of work in commemoration of an event.” I hate to tell you this, but as a single mother I spend the Christmas “holiday” running around like Mrs. Brady on crack. I get off work at nine or ten at night, fly up to Times Square in a cab, work my way through Toys ’R Us, then try in vain to cram my bags into another cab in the freezing cold before giving up and opting for delivery. I mean, there’s nothing restful about it. Frankly, anyone who tells you it’s restful is either lying or on meds.
Instead of these fake holidays commemorating things that didn’t even happen (Most scholars don’t even think Jesus’s actual birthday was in December!), I propose all employers give their employees at least five to ten personal days per year in addition to their sick and vacation days. This way, we could take a day off work anytime we think something is holy. If you want your self-made holiday to be January 5—which I highly recommend, since travel is cheaper than ever and everything’s 50 to 90 percent off—then go for it! If you’d rather celebrate the Navajo Sing Festival in February or the Hindu Ganesh Chaturthi festival in September, go for it! People who aren’t religious could vacation à la France, combining all these days into a month off in August. Alternatively, they could just stay at the office on the traditional holidays and get paid time and a half while everyone else goes home to celebrate their holidays!
Let’s be honest. Presidents’ Day? Is there one American who actually spends this day celebrating our presidents? Columbus Day? Do we really need a mandatory day off to celebrate one of the most destructive humans in history? No one’s sitting home reading about Columbus on that day, anyway, so why not just eliminate it? Mother’s Day is actually the only current American holiday I can really get behind, provided we combine it with Father’s Day to turn it into Parents’ Day, so that kids who only have one parent or two same-sex parents don’t feel bad. I mean, why should I be forced to take a day off on Columbus Day instead of on my own guru’s birthday, February 21? Leonard Cohen’s birthday would also be a holiday in my church. I’d probably also take a yearly holiday to Amsterdam with a few girlfriends to celebrate our friendship and our love for each other. Doesn’t this all make much more sense? What matters to you, and what would you celebrate?
Dude, You’re Talking Turkey
Thanksgiving is one of my least favorite American holidays. Like Christmas, it has become a huge industry. Each year, we celebrate it by slaughtering 45 million turkeys and eating (on average) 4,500 calories in a single meal. There’s just one problem. What are we celebrating? I didn’t figure out that Thanksgiving was a totally fabricated holiday until I met the American Indian leader John Trudell—who became my lover, teacher, and lifelong friend—in 1991. That’s when I started thinking honestly about the fact that every year, hundreds of millions of Americans sit around and eat turkeys to celebrate our annihilation of an entire race of people.
All throughout school, I’d been taught in history class that Thanksgiving was to commemorate the pilgrims and the Indians shaking hands, making friends, and eating corn and squash for dinner. But what really happened is that Europeans came over and obliterated this continent’s inhabitants with guns and diseases and then stole their land. The ones they couldn’t kill off, even after hundreds of years of wars, they crowded onto the worst tracts of land—Indian reservations—and plied with cigarettes and alcohol. Over the years, the “Americans” told the Indians to give up their spiritual practices, from medicine wheels to Sun dancing, to cut their hair, change their names, and learn English if they wanted to continue to receive subsidies.
This is what we celebrate when we celebrate Thanksgiving. In many schools, we’re still brainwashing our children with these lies. Can you imagine what the Indian kids must be thinking? It would be like everyone in New York City having cake for Hitler’s birthday! I don’t understand why there aren’t twenty-five thousand Indians outside Macy’s each year protesting this! Where is everyone? Are they all on the Internet?
Despite the fact that the first alleged “Thanksgiving” happened in 1621, it wasn’t until 1939 that Thanksgiving became the caloric binge it is today. That’s when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt officially proposed that it happen annually on the last Thursday of November—not in order to celebrate history or our heritage (even
