There's always a reason to celebrate

I felt like the last few blog entries have been me babbling about my day without any other sense of direction. So tonight, I want to talk about holidays. Let me start by saying that there is a holiday for practically everything. For example, between now and Friday the 9th, we will have holidays that include Harlem Globetrotter's Day, Argyle Day, National English Toffee Day, and National Static Electricity Day. It's nuts. Of course, these are all daily holidays, when there are also weekly observances like National Folic Acid Awareness Week (1/4-1/10) and monthly observances like National Polka Music Month. Of course, there are many holidays that seem more fitting with their season/time of year. So for January, many observances are about getting a balanced life, starting resolutions, and cold weather activities, but it's just fun to point out the more ambitious ones.

One of the reasons that I like having so many random holidays is that it always give you a reason to celebrate something. It helps break up what may otherwise seem like a monotonous month because you can take a day to loudly play a kazoo (Jan 28) or learn more about penguins (Jan 20). Plus it means that every day is special.

(Aside - when I'm listing days for the holidays, I'm going off of quick searches on my online resources, so it's entirely possible that National Kazoo is technically the fourth Wednesday of the month which happens to be the 28th this year.)

I'm pretty confident that the first "non-traditional" holiday that ever caught my attention was Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept 19) in high school. I had a friend who would fully embrace a day of talking like a scurvy dog aboard the best pirate ship she could lay her eye on. Yar. It was just such a silly thing but at the same time, it was something silly people were doing on the same day across the country. Then in college, I had a different friend who would cut out squares of bubble wrap to pass out to celebrate Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day (last Monday of January).

Then when I was a CA in college (RA with a different name), I found a website that listed a plethora of daily/weekly/monthly holidays for the whole year (brownielocks.com). I've since used it many times for bulletin boards to highlight some of the weird holidays. It also helped me learn an alternative to Valentine's Day: Ferris Wheel Day. During the years when I was feeling bad about being single come February 14th, I would celebrate Ferris Wheel Day instead of Valentine's Day or Singles Appreciation Day. The way I thought of Ferris Wheel Day was that it was not pro-love or anti-love - it simply let love go off to a field of meadows to do its own thing. So, a typical Ferris Wheel Day would usually involve a movie that didn't focus on a love story or have a romantic subplot. Unfortunately, those movies are few and far between, so the go-to movies involved Rambo or zombies. (Zombieland was a personal favorite especially since it includes a Ferris Wheel tying us back to the holiday.) This was probably not the original intent of whoever claimed February 14th as Ferris Wheel Day, but it was something I could celebrate without feeling bad about my relationship status.

I looked through some old blog entries and say that I ended entries with a random holiday that was applicable to the date (so it could be a daily, weekly, or monthly celebration) as well as what I did that day. So, I think I'd like to start that back up again. With that said, today is one of the days of Celebration of Life Week, which means that the perfect way to celebrate is to celebrate!

DFTBA (Don't forget to be awesome)