Well, it's early and I have a doctor's appointment in about an hour, but I expect at least a few press releases today. We usually hear from Dark Horse around the first of the month and Marvel should send us the list of new releases for this week. Of course, I forgot that today is Columbus Day, so basically everything is closed.
You know, of all the extraneous "holidays" out there, Columbus Day certainly seems like a valid one. After all, the man did "discover" the land in which we now reside. He may not have been a very good man - it is said that he was a pretty harsh, even cruel, man; a slaver, cheat, womanizer and/or homosexual, and so forth - but the day is meant to celebrate his achievement and we all know how that goes. Most of the greatest achievements have been accomplished by men and women who were less than "moral" or scrupulous or whatever in their personal lives, so I don't dispute the validity of the holiday. Still, it's more than a bit inconvenient.
When you look back through history, it is filled with baseless holidays and festivals - a lot of them were created just to give the peasants and general populace a reason to celebrate something, a day off from work to boost their spirits, a little boozing and wenching, you know the drill - and Americans work more than any other country in the world, so there's a need for these holidays, no matter how "pointless" their origin. And we can't really go back and revise history to fit in with our calendar - even though we do it to fit in with our modern morés and values, to whitewash our cultural backdrop, and all sorts of other reasons. Still, why is it that so many holidays fall in the last three or four months of the year? It's like a famine of holidays right up through September/October, then they all hit, one right after the next.
And they're the big decorating holidays, to boot! So you work all year long up to Fall, then you spend those last two seasons planning, purchasing, decorating, and mailing. They don't feel much like holidays at all, when you get right down to it.
But whatever. Columbus Day. Bah, humbug!
You know, of all the extraneous "holidays" out there, Columbus Day certainly seems like a valid one. After all, the man did "discover" the land in which we now reside. He may not have been a very good man - it is said that he was a pretty harsh, even cruel, man; a slaver, cheat, womanizer and/or homosexual, and so forth - but the day is meant to celebrate his achievement and we all know how that goes. Most of the greatest achievements have been accomplished by men and women who were less than "moral" or scrupulous or whatever in their personal lives, so I don't dispute the validity of the holiday. Still, it's more than a bit inconvenient.
When you look back through history, it is filled with baseless holidays and festivals - a lot of them were created just to give the peasants and general populace a reason to celebrate something, a day off from work to boost their spirits, a little boozing and wenching, you know the drill - and Americans work more than any other country in the world, so there's a need for these holidays, no matter how "pointless" their origin. And we can't really go back and revise history to fit in with our calendar - even though we do it to fit in with our modern morés and values, to whitewash our cultural backdrop, and all sorts of other reasons. Still, why is it that so many holidays fall in the last three or four months of the year? It's like a famine of holidays right up through September/October, then they all hit, one right after the next.
And they're the big decorating holidays, to boot! So you work all year long up to Fall, then you spend those last two seasons planning, purchasing, decorating, and mailing. They don't feel much like holidays at all, when you get right down to it.
But whatever. Columbus Day. Bah, humbug!
No comments:
Post a Comment