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| In keeping with my current non-aggression policy I have decided not to expose what I know about certain social events such as Christmas, the tooth fairy and Easter. My oldest son can tell you (almost to the day) when I was in a bad mood and discussed my knowledge of those holidays. He will tell you to this day that he has never forgotten that conversation. I suppose some argument could be made in his favor that I had inflicted severe emotional harm to him and damaged his psyche or something like that. I’m surprised someone didn’t advise him to sue me or something. Obviously this was before I had completed the course on tact that my wife forced me to attend. So, rather than discussing those particular days and the symbols associated with them and possibly telling more than I should, I am going to focus on Halloween and maybe Thanksgiving, if I have enough time and room.
Now, let’s discuss Halloween. If this isn’t the fabrication of some special interest group I don’t know what is. I’ve done quite a bit of investigation and have found that the most likely group to prosper with this holiday is the pumpkin farmers of the nation. Think about it, what can you do with a pumpkin except carve it up and make some kind of Jack-o’-lantern? Pumpkins have a limited amount of use and virtually no commercial value. I mean, look around …if you wanted a pumpkin in say, July, where could you get one? Maybe a plastic one, left on the shelf from the previous year, but certainly not a real one for sure. Pumpkin pies are great, but a lot of folks don’t like the way they taste so they aren’t exactly a national bestseller are they? I suppose the National Pumpkin Growers of America (NPGOA) probably got together at some point in time and thought up this holiday just to get rid of the huge crop of annual pumpkins that we can’t export to any other country since they don’t know what they are. We could probably decrease the export deficit if we could convince some country like maybe, China, that pumpkins are some kind of exotic food that is considered a delicacy and highly prized. Then we wouldn’t have to start pushing Halloween as early as we do at this time. Seems like I start seeing costumes and orange stuff in the stores on or about July 5th. They seem to replace the July 4th stuff with the Halloween stuff. Likewise, on November 1st, they’ll start taking down the Halloween things and hanging up turkey and Thanksgiving stuff for sale. Speaking of turkeys, did you know that Ben Franklin suggested the turkey as the national bird? Wouldn’t this have been neat? Turkeys aren’t exactly the prettiest birds on the block are they? So here we’d have had a turkey head at the end of all of our flagpoles. There’s a sight for you to think about isn’t it? Of course, it might be appropriate to have the turkey as the symbol when they played “Hail to the Chief”. Well, enough of that. You can see the creeping face of commercialism coming into play with things like yams and rutabagas. Normal people don’t eat these things during most of the year but can’t seem to get enough of them during the holiday season. It seems to be some sort of tradition and thus is required to be done year after year. Farmers that couldn’t give their crops away make a killing that one time of the year when their crop comes into season and is part of some time honored tradition. Like those awful candy valentines that you get in February. Where are those things in say, August? Must be a way to make a lot of money here if we could just figure out some new holiday and tie it into some crop that is a poor seller. This shouldn’t be all that hard, just pick a month like June that doesn’t have a national holiday and tie it in with some kind of product …..Have to give this some additional thought…June – brides- chutney? It could happen. Just needs the right sales pitch. Anyway, have a good week. Send me your suggestions at www.pearyperry.com. |
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