Revisiting the Two Great American Pastimes: Celebrating and Freaking Out.

As we face down the start of The Celebrating and Freaking Out cycle again.

Yes, yes….I know I posted a version of this piece last Labor Day. But I decided I needed to update it for our current breath-takingly unnerving national circumstances. Also I bet most of you never even read the piece I posted last year. I was kind of proud of it. I should have made you all take a quiz. Maybe I will do it this year. There’s nothing stopping me. It’s MY substack page. So here we go.

 Everyone knows that we are a divided nation. No one is disputing that ever. Yet there are still some big things we all have in common.

Life in these semi-United States, on both sides of the aisle and in both of the primary colors, continues to mainly revolve around our two basic national pastimes:  1. Celebrating and  2. Freaking Out.   Sure, Washington might appear to be broken beyond repair but we, the people, are so busy celebrating and freaking out that we barely have time to pay any attention. As soon as we have a few free minutes after finishing our obligation to one, the other rushes in to fill the void. And in this way do we keep ourselves busy, busy, busy! Though we are not the only culture that organized itself this way.

It seems to be a universally human trait for every civilization to designate national days of celebration. The typical American calendar year offers a modest base-line total of eleven big holidays a year. This provides a family of four with about twenty different reasons for buying centerpieces and holding family gatherings (if you add an unspecified number of birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, sports team accomplishments and supposedly important award shows.)

Although this may seem like a lot, we are nowhere near competitive with ancient Rome, a civilization that celebrated a spectacular 159 publicly funded holidays a year! When you think about the fact that this only gave the Romans only two days to untangle a new set of decorations, put away the last set, clean the house and then organize the upcoming next holiday menu, it isn’t surprising they didn’t have the focus to keep their empire from crumbling.

And now that we have arrived at Labor Day, the official start of The Celebrating and/or Getting Ready to Celebrate Something Else’ Season, we find ourselves on the very precipice of the biggest part of our national annual celebratory cycle: the three plus continuous months of Hallo-giving-mas. Except this year, it is rudely interrupted by the terrors of another national election. This forces us all into the every-four-years seamless morphing of both Celebrating AND Freaking out. And this year, the freaking out part is so multi-dimensional that I would like to propose that it be included as an extension of Halloween.

But I’ll get to that in a second.

National Pastime #1: Celebrating.

Usually, in non-election years, we are all feeling a little feisty around Labor Day. We are ready to take on the exhilaration and exhaustion of celebrating because we had holiday-free-August off for R&R …(unless, like me, you are a member of Costco, in which case you had your first stirrings of the pre-lit Christmas trees right around the 4th of July.)

Most of us just sleep-walk thru Labor Day, a holiday which has long distinguished itself by offering no clues at all about how it would like to be celebrated. It could have asked us to dress up as out favorite laborers and we maybe would have cooperated. But no…it seems to be more interested in a generic barbecue, eschewing even a single labor-oriented theme song or a nice pastel colored string of lights that match the colors of the most common working-people uniforms. Even the people (or AI) that write ‘Wiki-How’ (whatever that is) seem clueless about what Labor Day wants from us. This year, their numbered list of celebration suggestions were as follows: #1 Attend a Labor Day parade or festival #2 Host a Labor Day party. #3 Go to someone else's picnic or party. #4 Enjoy a football game.#5 Go swimming for the day. #6 Take a day trip to a new place. #7 Check out Labor Day sales. #8. Don’t waste any more time reading these. Just get up off your lazy butt, make yourself a tasty many-layeredsandwich and call it a ‘Labor Day’ sandwich. And if you have any sense, remember what combination of ingredients you used so you can do a call-back next year and call it a tradition! Annual celebration invented and completed! Kudos!

Anyway, by the time mid-September arrives, usually we are out of available options for trying to ignore the rumbling of the holiday train as it is pulling in to the station. Whether you want to play along or not makes no difference at all once those seasonal songs begin playing on the sound systems in stores. Sure, we may not have as many designated celebratory dates as the ancient Romans, but as a cultural entity we have been doing our best to pick up the slack by expanding each holiday already on the books into a many months long extravaganza.

In my lifetime I have observed, with interest, how Halloween, the only holiday that consciously tries to combine celebrating AND freaking out in to one unstoppable package, has expanded to fill the entire month of October. Along side this, the once common Halloween yard tableaus featuring hanging dead corpses or decapitated body parts has begun to ask the question whether or not this gory display is even about Halloween at all or just the front yard of a second amendment obsessive, wanna-be mass-shooter or Jan.6 supporter proudly showing off their plans for a new civil war.

THIS year, with an especially terrifying election just 5 days after Halloween, it would seem pragmatic to loop a dramatic Halloween extension onto October 31 by adding a second trick-or-treat event where children can dress up like JD Vance and his bro-authoritarian-state-pals, then go door-to-door, showing ID’s and checking to see if you are hiding any disgusting and useless childless women who really belong in interment camps. The fun twist is that, in an update on Trick-or-Treat, they will agree to leave you alone if you give them exactly the right kind of candy.

But for the sake of my sanity, lets assume that Halloween IS going to end happily this year, allowing us to move on to the real nexus of celebrating: Thanksgimas. Because, let’s face it: We all gave up on trying to keep Christmas from being a multi-month affair decades ago. And recently Thanksgiving began to grow some new tendrils that reach into the hoping-to-be-a-holiday-soon ‘Pumpkin Spice Season’ and synch up to the emotional wrenching End of Daylight Savings.

Of course, Christmas doesn’t even pretend to be over until New Years Day…which is the first time any decorations you provided begin to look like you put them up a decade ago.

And this year….with that looming election…I don’t even want to speculate about New Year’s Eve for fear I will tempt The Evil Eye that my grandmother was always warning about.

So instead, I would like to take this opportunity to suggest (as I do every year) that we look ahead to February and my brilliant idea of giving the expanded holiday- treatment to Valentines Day which, as it now exists, remains a holiday still confined to a burst of resentful last minute spending, too close to the recent expenses of Christmas presents to be anything besides a barely disguised, thread-bare attempt at romantic fervor. “Here. Have some chocolate” beleaguered partners everywhere say to women who spent the rest of the year trying not to eat carbs or sugar (if they are not already on Ozempic.)

But hear me out: Valentine’s Day is a missed opportunity to unite the community behind the most interesting combination of celebrating and freaking out conceivable.

All that is needed is a way to get everyone to play along with a mandatory new tradition wherein every household decorates their yard and/or roof-top with a 3 dimensional diorama showing, as honestly as possible, the joys or nightmares that Cupid bestowed in recent memory. Think of the excitement of loading the family into the car and then driving around the neighborhood, observing what exactly has been going on in the other homes, love-and-romance-wise. “Wow. Those two are still together?” you will say to each other, as you drive past the house on the corner festooned with a tableau of two people glaring at each other. “Look at the decorations on this house.” you will all say at the same time, “It looks like between them they have, six, no, seven, no, EIGHT former spouses!” It would be an amazing way to really get to know your neighbors at their most intriguing! Please, someone: Help me get this going!

Celebrating The New Improved Valentine’s Day at the Smith House.

Moving on to:

National Past Time #2: Freaking Out.

As a culture, we love the idea of filling all of the time available between holidays by hurling ourselves headlong into terrifying and infuriating portals of fear and outrage. We are like hypochondriacs immersed in reading the Merck’s Diagnostic Manual, finding new meanings for common and usually harmless symptoms that will scare us into paralysis.

Why are we like this? Did we all become adrenaline junkies from watching too many horror movies as kids? Doesn’t life provide us with enough really scary stuff on a day to day basis that we don’t need to invent new crazy stuff? Certainly the MAGAs among us provide new terrifying imaginary details on a daily basis. Over the weekend you-know-who rolled out a baseless but scary one about public schools performing unasked for surgery on children. But MAGA’s, ask yourself this: Didn’t Democrats enact enough actual policy details you didn’t agree with that you didn’t need to bother pretending they were an underground sex trafficking ring that drinks the blood of children?

The answers are yes, absolutely yes and no, apparently not.

My husband likes the freaking out part of our tradition so much that he regularly lies in bed, perusing mug shots of alarming, aggressive-or-shellshocked, just-arrested people. “Want to see a photo of the guy who boiled and ate his uncle?” he will ask me daily, holding up his Ipad to show me a photo of a wild eyed guy with many, many facial tattoos. “No, thanks.” I usually respond, afraid to open my eyes and therefore causing him great disappointment. Though he is always ready with a comeback, like ”How about a woman who stabbed her mother with a stiletto?”

Not unlike beloved holidays, terrifying predictions of bad times to come provide us with many things that we value. They help us cast a warm glow on the boring daily routines that we would otherwise take for granted. They heighten the positive aspects of the dull moments of our existence. They remind us that even the intolerable but generally ordinary behaviors of our problematic families are a thing for which we should have gratitude. Of the above, that last one might be the most challenging.

But living in terror that we are approaching the end of the world goes back to the beginning of recorded history. Archeologists found an Assyrian clay tablet from around 2800 B.C. which bears the inscription: “There are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; the end of the world is evidently approaching.”

In fact, there have been more specific predictions of the end of the world than there are numbers. A brief perusal of these predictions, according to Wikipedia, shows that there was at least one per year for almost every recorded century of human history. Because I am me, you probably think I am exaggerating. So I will now list for you the dates the end of the world was predicted in ONLY the 20th century: 1901,1910,1911,1914,1915,1918,1920,1925,1926,1924,1935,1936,1941,1943,1947,1954,1959,1960,1962,1967,1969,1972,1974,1975,1976,1977,1979,1980,1981,1982,1986,1987,1988,1989,1990,1991,1992,1993,1994,1995,1997,1998,1999. There were multiples for 2000, as there always are at a century change.

The earliest specifically designated freak-out dates that I remember taking seriously were during my college years at UC Berkeley where, on MANY occasions, I was solemnly informed by people who were said to be knowledgeable about such things that in three days hence, the planets would be lined up in a way that had not occurred since Pompeii was destroyed. These predictions were so integrated into life in the Bay Area during the decade I lived there that if someone didn’t give an exact date for a big catastrophic earthquake in San Francisco at least twice a year, the residents of the city would begin to get cranky.

By the time I entered my so-called ‘adulthood’, there was such an array of regularly predicted, unique reasons for freaking out that most of them now have their own Wikipedia pages. 1973 had the ominous comet Kahoutek, thought to be a portent of a colossal doomsday event. It was followed closely by the coming ruination of civilization by the falling pieces of Sky Lab.

As time went on, I was beside myself about the hole in the Ozone layer, Watergate, and several versions of El Nino and La Nina. Other terrifying touch stones I can remember, without even trying too hard, are Barry Goldwater, The John Birch Society, The Symbionese Liberation Army, Swine Flu, SARS, Avian flu, Mad Cow disease, Epstein-Barr syndrome, Ronald Reagan’s dementia, Dan Quayle, Morton Downey Junior, The Satanic Panic, the Red and Orange alerts, shoe bombers, killer bees, Dick Cheney running the white house, George Bush’s limited IQ, Bill Clinton’s sex-capades, Pizza-gate, the end of the Mayan calendar and a coming geo-thermal eruption of Yellowstone that will kick-off a new ice age.

I am still waiting for someone to apologize to me for Y2K. If you were too young to have registered the impact of this one, it involved a supposed difficulty that computers were going to have changing the year from 1999 to 2000 that was going to keep so many computerized systems from functioning properly that planes would fall out of the sky and all the utilities and water purification systems would shut down and go off the grid. There were warnings of possible “nuclear war,” caused by glitches in early-warning systems; the International Monetary Fund predicted economic chaos in developing nations; Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan worried that panic would prompt U.S. businesses to stockpile goods, leading to widespread shortages, and CNN reported that the U.S. milk supply would dry up because dairy farm equipment might malfunction. (If only, says the vegan in me). And after all that tension and hysteria, which I guess everyone kind of enjoyed, no one ever stepped forward to offer a little “Oops. Sorry. My bad.” when NOTHING happened.

Since the internet became everything, we as a population of humans have exponentially expanded our commitment to freaking out by adding baseless conspiracies that, before social media, could never have gained so much traction. The GOP, never a bastion of sanity in any era, likes the media attention that freaking out offers them so much that creating and spreading new unsubstantiated reasons for panic and terror has become the entirety of their brand.

I feel I should add that both political parties enjoy freaking out whenever possible. Whoever is not in power gets to take the lead. I can remember feeling frozen with terror about concentration camps that I heard that Dick Cheney was creating. (And, by the way, the fact that it never happened is doing nothing to allay my fears of an authoritarian take-over by the current bunch of demented candidates and their creepy incel partners.) (Though I suppose some kind of mention should be made that while he never did create said concentration camps, Dick Cheney did manage to co-create Liz Cheney, who did such a great job of chairing the Jan. 6 Committee hearings. So go figure.)

But now, just in case we didn’t have enough worrisome reality based stuff on our plates like pandemics and climate change , we the people seem to have also decided to extend our once-every-four-years-nerve wracking-tension-fest that is the Presidential Election to a continuous 12 months-a-year affair that re-starts, with all new polling results, only ONE second after the previous election cycle ends. To top it off, we have decided to appoint, as a permanent contender for the job of president, the scariest and least qualified candidate to ever accrue a huge following while simultaneously being convicted of felonies and continuously threatening to seek revenge on his enemies and undo the basic tenets of democracy. That is a long way of saying that the continually morphing nightmare of idiocy that falls into the category of all-things-MAGA is the greatest boon to our love of freaking out that has been created to date. Every time anything starts to seem even the smallest amount under control, that guy and his thought-free attendants can be counted on to find a way to kick off the cycle again.

Which is why I have decided that we also need to make room for a new set of National holidays that will combine celebrating AND freaking out. We can call them Nostradamus Days, so named because after years of paying too much attention to the cues requiring me to freak out, I can honestly say that the safest days of any given year have always been the ones on which Nostradamus bestowed a prediction of disaster. And that is why I am proposing that we reclaim them and designate them as national days of relaxation. Hopefully Wiki-How will rise to the occasion and compile a list of suggestions on how they should be celebrated: “Attend a Nostradamus Day picnic or parade. Have a Nostradamus Day dinner during which you serve your family the most un-exciting meal you know how to prepare, then sit down together and read a long list of Nostradamus predictions that never happened.”

But first, for the sake of entertainment, let’s re-organize Valentine’s Day. Come on! Don’t we deserve at least one holiday that is devoted to guilty-pleasure fun?