National Holiday Last Call

Chris O'Carroll

Not that the first three-quarters of our year are devoid of celebrations. Hell, we start things off by giving ourselves a holiday as soon as we’ve hung the new calendar on the kitchen wall. Though that day’s festivities do tend toward the bloodless and low-key. We peruse news stories about traffic fatalities, we overdose on football games, and we experiment to determine which tasteless, mass-produced beer provides the best hair-of-the-dog remedy for the previous night’s revelry.

Sometimes we solemnize the day with New Year’s resolutions, behavior modification pledges that we intone in a ritual of acknowledging faults we have no real intention of correcting. Then we devote two or three weeks to breaking our resolutions, a nice warm-up for the institutional hypocrisy of Martin Luther King Day, when white Americans piously pretend that racial justice has always been a top national priority. But I’m letting cynicism run away with me here. There is one aspect of Dr. King’s legacy that white folks truly cherish: we believe ardently that all Negroes should be nonviolent. That’s why we make sure that white cops carry plenty of ammo. Nothing like a few dozen well placed slugs to leave our black fellow citizens face down in a pool of nonviolence.

Next comes Groundhog Day, a holiday that used to occasion bemused inquiries from friends in other countries to whom I had sent scenic American calendars as Christmas gifts. Now, of course, Hollywood has cleared up the confusion. People all over the world have become familiar with the beloved American tradition according to which every time Bill Murray sees his shadow, he gets to have sex with Andie McDowell. No, I’m just kidding. I don’t really have friends in other countries. That would be illegal under the new Homeland Security Through Xenophobia Act.

Which brings us to the gladsome patriotic festival of Presidents Day. (Once upon a time, we had two separate February holidays for the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. But then we wised up and realized that if we maintained our proud average of one decent president every century, we’d eventually run out of calendar space.) Times being what they are, I imagine we’ll be using the next few Presidents Days to rejoice that foreign officials don’t really think George W. Bush is a moron, no matter what they may reportedly have said in moments of unguarded candor. They don’t think so, and we don’t think so either. We believe that Bush is an intellectual giant who got into Yale and Harvard strictly on academic merit, without reference to family connections. We believe that he is a courageous patriot who wangled himself a berth in the Texas Air National Guard because he thought it was a frontline Vietnam fighting unit. We believe that his business career was a study in spotless integrity. We believe that his party-hearty frat-boy lifestyle, though it extended well beyond his undergraduate years, did not involve a single instance of cocaine use. We believe that his dissembling about his drunk driving record was part of a wise parental strategy designed to instruct his twin daughters in the virtues of sobriety, personal responsibility, and respect for the law. We believe that he is governing in the best interest of all Americans, not for the benefit of a wealthy and corrupt corporate elite. We believe that he is a sincere lover of freedom who would never stoop to using a “war on terrorism” as camouflage for an economic and cultural agenda that has nothing to do with national security. We believe that he is anything but a swaggering unilateralist bully boy and that he has always had the deepest reverence for the United Nations. Above all, we believe that he really won the election.

But February’s most important holiday - most important in the sense that it moves the most merchandise and thus wafts the most incense past the nostrils of our highest national deity - is Valentine’s Day. This celebration of romantic love plugs into our calendar in approximately the spot once occupied by the ancient Roman Lupercalia, a fertility festival that featured young men clad in animal hides cavorting through the Eternal City whaling on pedestrians with goatskin whips. Then the Roman authorities chopped off the head of a Christian priest, European adventurers brought back chocolate from the Americas, and some poet decided that violets, their name notwithstanding, were blue. You know the rest of the story, which makes as much sense as anything that has to do with the mystery of love.

As the roar with which March comes in is transmuting into the bleat with which the month goes out, all of America takes a moment to jig to the frisky piping of St. Patrick’s Day. Valentine is a saint, too, but for some reason it feels OK to drop the honorific when referring to February 14, whereas nobody would think of calling March 17 simply “Patrick’s Day.” I attribute this to the same Hibernian public relations flair that has given the shamrock and the leprechaun a cachet not enjoyed by the holiday icons of any other nationality. Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Jews, Mexicans, Poles, Puerto Ricans - these and other U.S. ethnic communities celebrate various festivals that attract a modicum of media coverage every year, but their holidays retain a quaint aura of otherness. None has broken through into the American mainstream to the same extent as St. Patrick’s Day (although Cinco de Mayo seems to be right on the verge). I can only conclude that my people are not the only ones who enjoy drinking heavily and excluding gays from our parades. Oscar Wilde? Brendan Behan? Sorry, those names don’t ring a bell. Holy Mother the Church does her best to see to it that even heterosexuality is more than we know how to deal with. Give us a break.

April Fool’s Day remains something of an under-exploited resource in this country. College newspapers use the day to outrage campus administrators by publishing vulgar parody issues, and morning radio shows enjoy unsettling their listeners with prank news stories. But further up the media food chain, our big-city daily papers and national news broadcasts generally fail to get into the spirit of the occasion. (National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” is one exception to this sorry rule, and if you know of others, I’d love to hear about them.) They do the day better in England, where the BBC, the London Times and other sober, respected news outlets devote considerable ingenuity to April Fooling the public with straight-faced reports of bogus events. We Yanks like to think of ourselves as freewheelin’ fun lovers whose robust frontier ways contrast with the stiff-upper-lip prissiness of our cross-the-pond cousins. But on April Fool’s Day we’re forced to confront the fact that it ain’t necessarily so. While we strike our grimly earnest World’s Only Superpower pose, with a two-by-four of self-importance up our collective butt, the surprisingly puckish Brits are managing to have a lot more fun.

Easter is the hardest holiday to pin down on our calendar, which is only part of what makes the day such a delight for a contrarian who likes to have life’s banquet seasoned with a bit of anarchy. The first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox usually falls sometime in April, but not always. As the holiday does its quicksilver darting hither and yon, I rejoice in the vagaries of the lunar calendar, a metaphoric reminder that reality is more protean and its boundaries more porous than we often care to admit. But I take a deeper, wickeder delight in noting the extent to which traditional Easter celebrations are blithely unrelated to the religious meaning of the holiday. Hunting for hidden chocolates in the family living room or playing with eggs on the White House lawn has as little to with the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection as a game of hopscotch would have to do with Ramadan or a pillow fight with Yom Kippur. One searches the Gospels in vain for word of a candy-distributing bunny, and while Jesus is said to have performed a variety of food and drink miracles, none of them involved the supernatural multiplication of jellybeans. So every year’s Easter festivities help give the lie to the fundamentalist Christian theocracy lobby that likes to see the United States as a de facto Christian nation despite the godless fine print that some secular humanist conspirators contrived to slip into the First Amendment.

In Three Days of the Condor, John Houseman’s character delivers a wise and cynical line about World War I - “what we used to call the Great War, before we knew enough to number them.” The insight embodied in that observation comes in handy when considering Memorial Day (formerly Decoration Day) and Veterans Day (formerly Armistice Day). Each of these holidays was originally inspired by a particular armed conflict, one domestic and one foreign. But it quickly became apparent that you can’t conduct the affairs of a global empire and deploy the mightiest military machine in human history if you’re going to let yourself get bogged down with a separate holiday for every war. (In any case, Americans don’t have the detailed knowledge of history that would enable them to keep track of all those holidays. Our public schools are places where kids learn to salute the flag, not to get picky and specific about individual wars.) One generic day for all veterans and another for all war dead was obviously the way to go. About the manner in which our national leaders habitually mark these holidays, I will say only that the car dealer with the most red-white-and-blue bunting festooning the lot is usually the one most likely to rip you off.

At the risk of having my sardonic dissenter credentials revoked, I have to admit that I’ve always enjoyed the 4th of July, a holiday that commemorates a resolution adopted by Congress on the 2nd of July and a document that received its final signatures on the 2nd of August. God bless America. We’ve had some pretty ghastly leaders since 1776, but none who’ve been able to take the shine off the splendid ideals and elegant prose in the Declaration of Independence. One can be aware of Martin Luther’s virulent anti-Semitism and still acknowledge the 95 Theses and the Protestant Reformation as monumental contributions to the cause of human liberty. Similarly, one can look askance at Thomas Jefferson’s racism while still experiencing a profound intellectual and spiritual frisson when reading those words about self-evident truths, the consent of the governed, and the right of the people to alter or abolish a pernicious government. Also, you have to admit that the American Revolution was a pretty interesting episode in military history.

Interesting in that the Americans lost virtually all the major battles yet won the war. We tried that strategy later with somewhat less success in Vietnam. To this day, I’m convinced that if the Viet Cong had been wearing red jackets with big white X’s on the chest, we could have beat them. These are just a few of the patriotic musings that explode in colorful cascades across the dark sky of my mind as I revel in the ancient Chinese technology that has become emblematic of our national birthday celebration.

In the great cultural and economic scheme of things, Memorial Day is little more than the start of the summer spending season, although that reality is usually obscured by a lot of pro forma political posturing. When it comes to Labor Day, nobody even pretends very hard nowadays that the holiday is anything more than the summer’s last hurrah. Politicians, especially those chickenhawks who applauded the Vietnam war while assiduously avoiding service, know that they are expected to feign respect for the folks in uniform. But why should they bother wasting some perfectly good hypocrisy on a display of faux admiration for labor? In today’s political climate, they can score all the necessary reverence-for-hard-work points simply by making a few derogatory remarks about people on welfare.

You may be aware that American Indians prefer not to celebrate Columbus Day. They cop quite an attitude about it. What a bunch of soreheads. You launch one 500-year campaign of genocide, they never want to let you forget it. Hey, answer me this, chief: if the white man had never come to these shores, who’d be emptying their pockets at your fancy casinos, huh? Try feeding a buffalo hide or some wampum into a slot machine and maybe you’ll begin to get the picture. Don’t bother thanking us for the Yankee dollar, just shut up and join the parade.

Which brings us to the year-end cluster of holidays that really move the needle on our cultural Richter scale. (I know, I’ve skipped some of your favorites - Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Arbor Day, Flag Day, etc. Trust me, you can add all of them to the ones I’ve already mentioned, you still won’t come close to matching the festive firepower of the Halloween-Thanksgiving-Christmas triumvirate. The General Assembly has the Security Council outnumbered, but everybody knows where the real power lies.)

Every suburban home is a medieval cathedral and every parent with a pumpkin and a knife is a gargoyle artisan channeling primal fears. Flames flicker behind a thousand goofy and demonic grins. Foul is fair, frightful is fun, and my wife is rolling her eyes as I insist on donning a black robe and a spooky, face-obscuring hood to answer the door when trick-or-treaters come knocking. Halloween rings the nation’s cash registers louder than any holiday but Christmas, and I call that money well spent. Unless you live in New Orleans and indulge in the over-the-top dress-up fantasies of Mardi Gras, no festival enlivens the imagination like this one, gives such free rein to the fantastical, invites such abandoned spelunking through the quirky caverns of the subconscious.

Tight-lipped fundamentalists add to the fun with anti-Halloween fulminations that have become as much a seasonal tradition as the store-window skeletons, black cats, and broomstick-straddling witches. The same Christian Taliban types who want to boot Charles Darwin out of the classroom and Harry Potter out of the library get frightfully exercised every year about a holiday they see as Satan’s own. I’m pretty sure that people who celebrate Halloween without being devil worshippers are even more numerous than the multitudes who celebrate Christmas without believing in the Virgin Birth, but we certainly get good entertainment value from the heavy breathing of crusaders who regard schoolkids in goblin outfits with the same horror that John Ashcroft experiences when he spies a bare-breasted Justice statue. One particularly amusing development in the realm of Halloween counter-programming has been the emergence of the church-sponsored house of horrors with a damnation theme. God-fearing holiday revelers costume themselves as devilish proprietors of the Pit, or as drug users, homosexuals, abortion providers, and other sinners, and invite the public to gaze upon cautionary tableaux of afterlife torment and too-late repentance. Jonathan Edwards, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

Thanksgiving is another holiday, like Columbus Day, on which we celebrate the close historic ties between the savage red-skinned tribes of North America and the savage white-skinned tribes of Europe. Both teams had honed their torture and slaughter skills through many generations of internecine warfare, so the match-up was an eagerly awaited one. The Americans had home-field advantage, but the Europeans had what they believed was a superior religion and what they knew for damn sure were superior weapons. After enjoying a hearty meal together, the two bands of savages got down to the serious business of real estate transfer deals written in blood. A few centuries later, Sacagawea is on a coin nobody cares to use, Leonard Peltier is doing life in a federal prison, and we all love cranberry sauce. So over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go.

I feel that my ancestral Celtic tribes in the British Isles had a great deal in common with our North American counterparts - mostly a long history of painting our faces, stealing each other’s livestock, and losing wars to the English. Yet I have to confess that neither my heavy-handed irony about American history, nor the authentic underlying anger, has ever spoiled my appetite for Thanksgiving dinner. Among the basic, primitive pleasures of the body, eating is the only one that I feel comfortable sharing with a crowd of friends and relatives. And since I’m fortunate enough to like most of the people to whom I’m related by blood or marriage (and most of those with whom I chance to link arms professionally), the day is usually a bellyful of joy. This year, I feasted in New Jersey at the home of my wife’s brother and sister-in-law. Last year, I was in residence with a theatre company is Wisconsin, where a couple of generous board members spread a table for all of us woebegone strolling players far from home. The year before that, my wife and I were in Illinois, joining forces with our son’s future mother-in-law to prepare a holiday meal at the young couple’s apartment. The year before that, we were in California, cooking for our other son and his roommates. Further back than that, my memory gets a little cloudy, but I’m sure there were other good meals savored in good company. All occasions for giving heartfelt thanks to whatever higher powers may be. I’m enough of a sentimental sap to feel confident that the country is aglow with plenty of genuine gratitude as people dig into that annual meal. Even before the leftovers have migrated to the back of the fridge, however, an awful lot of us have reverted to conventional proud-to-be-an-American thinking, as if being born in a free and prosperous land were an accomplishment like winning the World Series rather than a stroke of luck like winning the lottery.

After the psychodrama and phantasmagoria of Halloween and the victual-worship rites of Thanksgiving, you’d think our energies might be spent. You’d think we’d be ready to kick back and let the rest of the year coast by. But even as we buy our Thanksgiving turkeys, we’re already hearing reminders of the number of shopping days left till Christmas. Every year, this relentless countdown works on us like a drill sergeant’s cadence count on a platoon of boot camp trainees, and we find ourselves quick-timing it through the paces that the national economy expects of all its faithful sons and daughters. Nobody’s really sure anymore what frankincense and myrrh might be, but we know what’s expected of us where gold is concerned.

While holiday spending provides the season’s main story line, there’s usually a lively subplot involving the public display of manger scenes. Lots of churches feature these crèches, which generally include a baby, two parents, three gift-bearing kings, a variable number of shepherds, and a few domestic animals, all framed by the outline of a rude stable. The scene tends to be thoroughly charming, and much more tasteful than some of the Yuletide yard displays built around red-nosed reindeer, gigantic candy canes, and enough lights for a Vegas casino façade. But there’s little charm in the fire-breathing antics of the evangelical hardliners who pop up every year insisting that this faith-based folk art must not be confined to churchyards and other private property. They want to see crèches in public parks, on village greens, at town halls. The words “separation of church and state” do not appear anywhere in the Constitution, they bellow. The First Amendment is there to safeguard against any one specific denomination gaining ascendancy as an established church. But Christianity in general is a majority faith in this country and it should bloody well start throwing its weight around like one. Our national commitment is to freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. That last makes a nifty bumper sticker, doesn’t it? Too bad it’s arrant nonsense. Freedom from religion is exactly what the non-establishment clause of the First Amendment guarantees. The free exercise clause means that I can mount any religious display I please in my front yard. If a neighbor who hates my beliefs decides to vandalize the artifacts I’ve set up, then cops whose salaries are paid by the whole community will show up to investigate, and will do their jobs whether or not the individual officers share my beliefs. That’s one half of the American religious freedom balancing act. The other half, the non-establishment clause, means that even if people who believe like me are a majority in the community, we can’t tax everybody else and use the money for monuments to our faith. But now that I’ve gone on record with that radical opinion, I’m the antichrist and can never run for president.

I usually spend Christmas with my wife’s family, a lively and varied clan whose three generations boast one Kenya-born American, one Briton who’s lived here for years but has no desire to become a citizen, several Singapore- and Hong Kong-born Chinese, and a bunch of Yanks whose ancestors include Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant immigrants from all over Europe. Once the kids have emptied their stockings, we all sit down to a traditional breakfast of bagels and lox before delving into the mountain of presents under the tree. Not everybody sticks around for a week, which is a relief to my mother-in-law, I’m sure. The folks who are still on the premises come New Year’s Eve toast each other with a cheerful awareness that the Chinese and Jewish calendars set different dates for the turning of the year. We’re all pretty wiped out by that climactic midnight, replete with food, drink, and all manner of material and emotional exchanges. A new year dawns in the USA, and we’re running on empty. Maybe other countries handle it better, I don’t know.

Chris O'Carroll

Chris O'Carroll | The Alsop Review