A couple of holidays have recently passed. Holidays are days, often religious in nature, created to celebrate an important event or person. This was their intended meaning anyway. Let’s be honest, nowadays none of the holidays are keeping it real. They’ve become bastardized misconstructions of their original meaning and purpose. What is to blame? Capitalism? Perhaps the rain — that blameworthy entity that also forces people to lip synch to sucky music. Yep, things have gotten bad. Right now the Easter bunny, Christ and Santa are in group therapy somewhere. Jesus apparently has a lot of issues with his father. Anyhow, let’s take a moment to examine the demise of the holidays.
Easter: If Jesus were in a grave, he’d be rolling over. Apparently, rabbits celebrate the resurrection of Christ by hopping around people’s yards, crapping eggs everywhere. These bunnies must engage in experimental drug use because the eggs only come in psychedelic colors. Their leader, named “Cadbury,” is somehow the only non-mute bunny in existence, and clucks like a chicken. As an aside, I think it would be really funny to go up to a mime and say over and over, “I know — you’re a bunny!” and “A bunny, right?”
Hey, the humor’s free, folks. Stop bitching.
My family played a central role in the desecration of this holiday. Each Easter my parents bailed out of mass after the Eucharist like sports fans trying to beat the traffic. This is because my grandparents were millionaires and hosted the most capitalist Easter egg hunt of all time. That’s right. Eggs were plastic and filled with cash. Now THAT was a hunt. It was Easter meets WWF Smackdown at the Hancock’s. I still have scars. Bills made great holiday decorations, too. Anybody who thinks money can’t grow on a tree never stopped by Grandmama’s house around Christmas time.
Christmas has morphed into the most bizarre concept of all: If you’re a good boy or girl, you receive toys manufactured in a sweatshop of midgets, delivered to you by reindeer with an attitude problem. The leading reindeer is nice enough but suffers a genetic mutation in the form of a glowing, red nose (or maybe he’s just spent some time “hanging out” with the Easter rabbits). Also in tow is a man whose name, suspiciously, can be rearranged to spell “Satan.” Although he’s dangerously obese, the “eight tiny reindeer” have no problem carting this individual all over the world in a matter of hours. In order to get you to behave, your parents refer to this man throughout the year (Occasionally, your mother may sleep with him out of boredom). Mom and Dad remind you that he is, creepily enough, watching you at all times. As an adult, this person is replaced by your boss who actually IS watching you at all times.
On second thought, I’ll see you a Christmas and raise you a Halloween. Once a year, parents encourage their children to dress up like murder victims, and force them to engage in public beggary. New Haven celebrates Halloween year-round, only all the children dress up as homeless people and “trick-or-treating” takes place in front of ABP.
April Fool’s Day is my favorite. On this day, you can say or do anything to anyone under the disclaimer “It’s April Fool’s!” Colleges mail out admissions letters and confuse all the prospective students. Nobody knows whether to show up to the school they were rejected from or vice versa (How do you think I got in here?). Great holiday. I, personally, plan to have all my children on April 1. Then if I don’t like them, I can return them along with my Made in Munchkinland Christmas presents.
St. Patricks Day: Awesome. Booze and cop a feel with impunity.
There’s Arbor Day, where we celebrate the trees we so gleefully cut down (See holiday called “Christmas”). I can hardly talk, though. The quantity of resumes I’ve sent out constitutes half of all rainforest destruction. I submitted an entire Brazilian village to Northwestern.
Columbus Day: Celebrate explorer Christopher Columbus and the fact that he got lost. What’s that all about? I read maps wrong all the time and my friends only get pissed. Telling them that I was busy discovering a New Neighborhood don’t make it better either. And schools are still open on my birthday.
Even summer vacation is a farce. Originally it was created so children could assist their parents with farm work. Now summer is mostly a popular essay topic in which schoolchildren try to expand the word “chillin'” to four pages. It’s also disappearing faster than my resume-fueling rainforest. For public school students (ie. me and that one other Yalie), summer was three blessed months long. Now each year, schools subtract a few days hoping no one will notice. Soon kids are going to be writing “How I spent my summer weekend” papers. The phenomenon is similar to how a certain university, ahem, subtly tacks on an extra grand to tuition each year.
But I’ll shut up now. After all, I still don’t know if I actually go here.
Noelle Hancock is a senior in Saybrook College.