February: The month of fake holidays

Written by Cindy Nevitt Friday, February 08, 2013 11:43 am

Despite its shortened length, day-challenged February is chock full of fake holidays. It’s like the calendar makers decided a wealth of made-up holidays would atone for the short shrift February gets every year.

There’s nary a week in the month that February doesn’t force the celebration of something. Barely one day old, February is pressured to produce a weather forecast using nothing more sophisticated than a rodent. We wait slack-mouthed for the creature to spot its shadow, an even less reliable source of weather prognostication than The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Technology is no match for the little marmot called Punxsutawney Phil. This is beyond absurd, as groundhogs hibernate in the winter, making them too smart to crawl out of a warm bed on a gray day to make shadow puppets with their own selves.

As February glides into its second week, Valentine’s Day looms. An occasion universally loved by florists and chocolatiers, Valentine’s Day is the ultimate Hallmark holiday. Couples clog restaurants, making it impossible for the rest of us to go out on that night. No one other than the woman receiving a diamond ring in a flute of champagne or baked into her dessert thinks the gesture is romantic. Everyone else in the dining room is thinking it’s a guarantee they’re going to have to perform the Heimlich maneuver on a stranger.

We celebrate President’s Day – the births of our country’s first president, George Washington, and the 16th, Abraham Lincoln – with sales promoting big-ticket items they didn’t own, like home appliances and luxury cars. Nothing says patriotism like a new dishwasher.

Every four years, we add another special day to February, Leap Day. This is generally acknowledged by ambitious holiday-happy celebrants as an opportunity to get an extra day’s sleep. What better way to mark the occasion than to hit a mattress sale, which is surely what the Gregorian calendar maker had in mind when he decreed the extra 1/4 day that occurs annually would get rolled into a whole day of its own every four years.

Leap Day is also Sadie Hawkins Day, because why have just one holiday on a day when we can have two?

We’re so crazy about holidays in February that we appropriate other cultures’ special occasions as our own. New Orleans too far to travel for Mardi Gras? Just have your Fat Tuesday wherever you are. Pancakes, the fare of choice, are portable, after all.

Not satisfied with our own New Year, which occurs at the too-infrequent pace of once a year, we enthusiastically embrace the Chinese New Year and its animal-named food specialties like bird’s nest soup. If Campbell’s put that in a can, we wouldn’t eat it. But associate it with a holiday and we’re all over it.

This year, the Year of the Snake, starts this weekend. Start your spoons, ladies and gentlemen!