The Winter Blahs
Included in my pay stub for late December was my company's official calendar of holidays on a piece of cardboard the with the same dimensions of a brochure. It's white, and holidays are marked in yellow and blue (provincial and federal, respectively) and paydays in red. I noticed an absence of colour in the early part of the year and realized that between January first and April ninth, there isn't a single holiday... except in Alberta, where cattle ranchers and oil tycoons can celebrate 'Family Day'.
So in the drabbest and coldest part of the year, when most cities celebrate a winter festival of some sort, millions celebrate Mardi Gras, religiously minded people celebrate Lent, and children celebrate March Break, I don't get a single day of mandated holiday by government? Oh, that blows, my friends.
A few years ago, Guinness beer had a promotion where they claimed that they would lobby the federal government to make St. Paddy's a holiday across Canada to help us celebrate our mulitculturalism, while recognizing a group that established the backbone of modern Canada... the Irish. Personally, I think this would just turn into a drinking holiday, the likes of which the earth has never seen. Again, that's just me.
More recently, Labatt had a campaign to call for a holiday in June, which also has no official holidays (except for two provincial holidays, which aren't in Ontario, so I don't care). Yeah, that'd be nice, but we get a lot of long weekends in the summer, and we NEED one in mid-February.
I think we should create a day to celebrate and embrace winter... a federal holiday to keep people from committing suicide from seasonal depression. We could call it "Don't-Kill-Yourself Day". Any ideas for a better name?