Get your fest on
Some less-than-conventional holidays are gaining popularity. And some aren’t.
Signy Holmes Staff
This April Fool’s Day, after enduring prank calls and getting a sore neck from looking for the word “gullible” on the ceiling, you may ask yourself “who invented this stupid holiday anyway?”
Well, we don’t really know, although some say it was the French. It sure gets you thinking, though — where do holidays come from? Are they mostly based on pagan rituals adapted to integrate with Christianity? Or was it just a bunch of guys sitting around in the year 1200 or so who decided they needed an excuse to party?
Well if the past was anything like today — and isn’t it always? — the answer shouldn’t be hard to find. Not all holidays were invented hundreds of years ago. In fact, holidays are being created under our very noses. Some may not make it far, but doubters probably said the same thing about Halloween and your birthday, so who knows what the future holds?
Yargh, mateys
It was June 6, 1995, when John Baur and Mark Summers were playing racquetball and, as guys tend to do, hurling insults at each other in, likely, an attempt to cover up for a certain lack of racquetball skills. Soon, as is only natural, the insults turned to pirate slang.
Pirate slang turned out to be so much fun that Baur and Summers decided that what the world needed then wasn’t love sweet love, but rather, Talk Like A Pirate Day.
They ran into problems almost immediately. June 6, you see, is the anniversary of D-Day. There are, it turns out, some things in life that should be taken seriously, and this is probably one of them. The setback was quickly dealt with, however, as Summers suggested what may very well have been the only date drilled into his head other than the Super Bowl or Christmas: his ex-wife’s birthday.
And so it was that September 19 was officially dubbed Talk Like A Pirate Day. Of course, no one else knew this. Someone had to get the word out — someone with power, influence, and the respect of people everywhere. It had to be American syndicated humour columnist Dave Barry.
Summers and Baur went home that day and pretty much forgot about the whole thing. In fact, they say, if it weren’t for a friend who reminded them when the day was coming up, Talk Like A Pirate Day might have languished, alone and forgotten on the YMCA racquetball court. As it was, it wasn’t much of a celebration, at least in scale.
The real coup came when Baur stumbled across Dave Barry’s e-mail address. Barry deemed Talk Like A Pirate Day to be a “very excellent” idea, and devoted an entire column to the subject. The day has been booming in popularity ever since, and has added the title “International” to its name. Baur and Summers, or rather, Ol’ Chumbucket and Cap’n Slappy, now have a book out called Pirattitude that details how to bring the pirate attitude into your daily life.
“This seems like an odd way to come to the world’s attention,” admitted Baur. Then again, “you don’t always get to pick the wave you ride. This one seems to have picked us and taken us for a much wilder ride than we ever expected.”
New kids on the block
Of course, International Talk Like A Pirate Day isn’t the only young holiday struggling for your notoriously short attention, though it’s certainly in the running for most unwieldy name. Other newcomers include Hobbit Day and Singles Awareness Day, celebrated on Valentine’s Day by some, but on the day before or after by others. No one’s too strict about these things, really.
Some of these holidays were founded with a practical purpose in mind. Blame Someone Else Day, held on the first Friday the 13th of the year, is a day to blame someone else for anything and everything that goes wrong, even if on any other day you’d be forced to admit you are the one at fault.
Of course, Friday the 13th has a whole other set of associations, so it’s nice to know that it doesn’t have to be all about the doom and bad luck. Research by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review indicates that it was American Anne Moeller who came up with Blame Someone Else Day after her alarm clock didn’t go off, making her late for all of her appointments that day.
Telling people her alarm clock didn’t go off apparently didn’t cut it after a while, and Moeller came up with other excuses — traffic lights and flat tires, for example. Of course, once you really set your mind to it, there are plenty of other things you can foist your problems onto next time Blame Someone Else Day comes around: gremlins, alien mind-control, global warming — excuses sure to earn you strange looks on any other day.
Only catch is, if no one else knows what day it is, you’ll get those looks anyway, but at least you’ll be able to look down on those who scorn you with smug self-satisfaction, knowing that they’re just out of the loop.
Of course, you also have those days that can only be truly appreciated by a very special sort of person. And that sort of person happens to be a nerd. Pi Day and Mole Day are based on important numerical constants, and Square Root Days occur when the day and the month are both the square root of the last two digits of the year. In other words, mark your calendars for March 3, 2009, and we’ll party like the squares we are.
Then you have those hybrid holidays that pop up around Christmas and Hanukkah, like Christmukkah, which was recently popularized on the FOX show The O.C., and Chrismahanukwanzakah, which throws Kwanzaa in for good measure.
Back in the ’90s, Seinfeld got in on the holiday action with Festivus, a day with the slogan “a Festivus for the rest of us,” featuring an undecorated aluminum pole in place of a Christmas tree and an “Airing of Grievances,” where everyone gets to air out their grudges and bitterness toward each other.
That last part may sound awfully familiar to some. But since you’ve probably got your own family traditions, like “Accidentally Bringing Up a Sore Subject and Causing Everyone to Yell at Each Other” or “The Burning of the Dinner,” why not make your own holiday? Christmabreakpartias, for example, or IgotsodrunkIlostaday . . . mas.
All in good fun
If it all sounds a bit ridiculous, that’s probably because it is. Ask A Stupid Question Day, Spatula Day, National Corndog Day . . . you just can’t take these things too seriously.
That raises the interesting question of when a holiday is just a joke, and when it’s something more. The distinction may have more to do with how much tradition a holiday has behind it than how much sense it really makes. After all, Easter? Sure, there are all those religious meanings to the day, but when it comes down to it, for its most fervent five-year-old devotees, the day is about candy.
Candy brought into their house at night by a rabbit, that is. Why no child suffers from horrible nightmares, knowing that if rabbits can get in, so can other things, is one of life’s great mysteries. Kids see monsters under the bed, in the closets and in the basement, but tell them a fat old man is coming into the house at night through the chimney, and they’re all smiles and giggles and glee.
Well, kids aren’t the only ones who need a good giggle, and nothing makes a more mature person giggle like the words “no pants.”
It was perhaps for this reason, or perhaps for reasons you don’t even want to think about, that No Pants Day was founded. Now, before you get your panties in a twist, you should know that No Pants Day strongly encourages the wearing of boxers, bloomers or briefs, though “pant substitutes” such as kilts and shorts are not to be tolerated.
Occurring on the first Friday of May for extra partying convenience, the day is a celebration of freedom from the oppression of pants. The official No Pants Day website hosts pictures of people’s pants-less escapades, with prizes handed out to the best entries.
Stop by and you can see Bryan and Ryan in all their barelegged glory after they were pulled over by a cop for speeding. Experience (although not pants-less experience) suggests the cop was not amused, and did not decide to join in on the celebration.
What it all adds up to
Baur and Summers have enjoyed greater success than many of their colleagues in the holiday business. Hallmark doesn’t seem to have jumped on the bandwagon, but you know they will soon, and at that point International Talk Like A Pirate Day will be right up there with, well, Secretary’s Day.
So when it comes to holidays you want to back, this one’s probably up there. At least, that’s Baur’s take on things.
“I don’t want to take anything away from any of those [other] holidays. They sound fun. But there’s something about talking like a pirate that’s just in a league by itself. Pirates swagger and growl and they’re not afraid to show the world who they are and what they want. Pirates were, as one historian said, ‘The freest people in the world,’ and it’s that freedom that we celebrate. It’s just fun to be totally inappropriate every now and then.”
Well, it’s nice to love what you do. And the position of “Inventor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day” has advantages other than the letterhead. These advantages, according to Baur, include parades and getting to buy swords and write them off on your taxes.
Of course, with all this enthusiasm, it’s easy to forget that most people still aren’t in on the joke, and are quite happy staying that way. After all, what’s a holiday without a day off? And trying to talk like a pirate can be quite tricky if you don’t have the vocabulary down quite right.
When asked what they would say to someone who flat-out refused to celebrate the holiday out of a sincere dislike for pirates, Baur and Summers had slightly different perspectives. While Baur admitted that some people, including his former boss, just “don’t get it,” Summers felt that if you don’t like pirates, “Then ye haven’t been properly cuddled by a pirate. Now get over here and let me cuddle ye!”
But in the end it’s Baur who sums it up best. “I suppose everyone can’t be a pirate,” he said. “Some people have got to be the prey.”
People are strange
Today, it’s easy to raise an eyebrow at someone who carries a towel around every May 25. But just think — maybe there was a time when no one knew what April Fool’s Day was except for a couple of buffoons who ran around pissing everyone off for no apparent reason. Maybe there was a time when rabbits really did infest people’s homes in the spring, and frightened children who’d been bitten too many times for comfort had to be consoled with candy.
Anything that’s really any fun is probably going to seem a bit off the wall until it catches on.
Take hockey: Bunch of padded goons on ice with knives on their feet paid enough to feed a small country to whack a lump of rubber and each other with sticks. Arbitrary rules about exactly what kinds of whacking are allowed and when you can cross different painted lines come included.
The hidden ridiculousness we can find all around us makes International Talk Like A Pirate Day seem just a little less strange — but don’t tell Baur, who has been riding the perceived strangeness of his holiday to something that may not be fame and fortune, but looks an awful lot like it.
You might not look for the moral to a story about a couple of guys and their pirate fetish, but Baur’s perspective on the good fortune he and Summers have encountered might make even Blackbeard a little misty. But then again, Blackbeard was a notorious softie.
