Out of Chaos...

 

Earlier this week, I realized that February is a month just chock full o’ holidays.  Well, maybe not exactly “chock full,” but there are four different days of note:  Lincoln’s Birthday, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and Washington’s Birthday.  Of course, Lincoln’s and Washington’s Birthday just kind of get wrapped into President’s Day, so I guess there are only two working holidays in the month.  But still, that’s something.  And besides, February sometimes has that weird extra day in it when it’s a leap year, and I think that day should be declared a holiday, too.  I mean, you can never have too many holidays as far as I’m concerned.

Anyway, President’s Day is coming up this Monday, and personally, I think that’s a holiday that deserves a little more attention.  Of course, the holiday itself is a bit lacking in some respects, and I guess that’s why it isn’t as big a deal as, say, Christmas.  It’s not a gift-giving occasion for one thing, and I think that’s too bad, although I really don’t know what would be considered an appropriate gift for President’s Day.  Maybe tiny little soaps cut into the shape of the White House would work.  But it isn’t like little children make out lists of what they want for President’s Day and send it to George Washington, The White House, USA.  No one makes a plate of cookies and sets them out President’s Day Eve for when Lincoln comes to leave you some presents.  You never hear about people buying expensive jewelry for a loved one or sending flowers for President’s Day.  True, a lot of stores have sales and send you coupons for 15% off in the mail, but it’s a bit of a loveless gesture really.  It sort of lacks that personal touch.

And President’s Day doesn’t have a lovable figure attached to it, either.  Now, we all know that I don’t find Cupid all that lovable and really think he’s sort of terrifying, but at least he puts a face on the holiday.  Christmas has Santa Claus, and Thanksgiving has a whole slew of adorable pilgrims.  But President’s Day has nothing.  And again, what would possibly work?  President’s Day is a celebration of dead presidents, so there are some obvious problems with the lovable figure there.  I mean, Cupid, Santa Claus, The Pilgrims—they never age.  You never see old Christmas cards that picture Santa as a young man.  He’s timeless.  But when you’re dealing with real historical figures, well, that’s another thing.  I suppose we could create cuddly versions of the Washington Monument or plush velour stuffed toys of the Lincoln Memorial, but it just wouldn’t be quite the same.  It would be hard to imagine little children toting around stuffed monoliths in the same way they carry around teddy bears.  I imagine a cuddly Washington Monument toy would be good for hitting other children or maybe tripping them, but it’s just really not the kind of lovable figure this holiday needs.

I think that maybe the biggest problem President’s Day has, though, is that there’s some confusion as what the hell the holiday is even really about.  I mean, different presidents and even some people who weren’t presidents are recognized on President’s Day.  And that’s just confusing because if there’s one thing a holiday needs to be clear about, it’s what’s actually being celebrated.  After all, there truly are more obscure holidays in the calendar, but they’re clear.  People know, for example, what Arbor Day is about.  It’s about trees.  There’s no confusion there.  No one has tried to sneak a tiny mention for perennials or flowering shrubs into the holiday.  It’s about trees, and on Arbor Day, you’re supposed to plant a tree.  It’s very clear.  No one thinks you’re supposed to recognize the day by chopping a branch off an elm and carrying it from bar to bar as you get progressively more drunk.  Arbor Day is about trees.  You plant a tree, and then you go home.  People get that. That’s why that holiday works even though most people have no idea when it even actually occurs. 

But President’s Day is really kind of a mess.  It started off as just a celebration of Washington’s Birthday, and it used to be celebrated on Washington’s actual birthday—February  22^nd.  But then Lincoln got assassinated, and people naturally got very sentimental about that, so they started celebrating Lincoln’s Birthday on February 12^th.  At one point in the 1950s, there was even a national committee formed to promote the establishment of President’s Day as a celebration of the office itself.  That day was going to be on the original Inauguration Day—March 4^th.   And interestingly enough, in Alabama, President’s Day commemorates the birthdays of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who was, by the way, born in April.  So, it’s a mess.  A real mess.  The only thing about it is that at least all that celebratory fervor eventually just got rolled into one day.  Of course, the date of that day changes (figures, doesn’t it), but it’s always on the third Monday in February.  And to the extent that there is any sort of uniformity at all in President’s Day, we have the one man who was brave enough to sign a law combining all those birthdays and commemorations into one floating holiday to thank.  And that courageous man was…

Richard Nixon.

Yeah, I know, you’re going “Richard Nixon?  What are you, kidding me?”  But it’s true.  In 1971, he signed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act into law and essentially created what we know today as President’s Day.  He’s the reason all those stores keep sending you coupons. He’s the man behind the suspension of mail delivery on Monday.  So, as strange as it probably sounds, if there’s one face that really is the face of President’s Day, it’s Richard Nixon’s.  He is to President’s Day what the Pilgrims are to Thanksgiving.  Whether that’s a good thing or not is debatable.

But I have to say that I have this weird connection to Nixon, a sort of odd camaraderie from my childhood.  You see, my grandfather, for some strange reason, always kept a framed picture of Nixon hanging on the wall in his basement, and I’d go over to my grandparents’ house and look at that picture and think, “Geez, what a crank.”  I mean, even in his happiest moments, Nixon always just looked cranky to me.  And I could identify with that because as a child, I was a bit of a crank myself.

Well, I don’t know if I’d say I was a crank so much as I was really just kind of a curmudgeon. I was the kind of little kid who would yell at other little kids to get off our lawn. And I was pretty sure that staying up past 11 pm was inherently immoral and that stunted growth was just the price you paid for it.  I mean, seriously, had I not been only 8 years old at the time, I probably would’ve voted for Nixon. 

The problem was that as a young curmudgeon, I was continuously bushwhacked by my own unflappable sense of moral decency and fair play, and nowhere was this more evident than in the way my little sister managed to outfox me at virtually every turn.  One game we used to play involved the Sears catalog, and the rules went like this:  you had $1000, and you had to spend as much of it as you possibly could.  You were only allowed to buy one of every item, and the person with the least amount of change coming at the end won the game.  Being the curmudgeon that I was, I’d always spend my turn trying to figure out the way to get the most value for my money.  My little sister, on the other hand, would just buy a pool table that cost $999.99.  It was kind of a short game.

She did the same thing when it came to playing one of our favorite games: doctor’s office.  I don’t really remember, but I think my older sister was the doctor, and our next-door neighbor was the receptionist (because even as children we knew that doctors didn’t answer their own phones).  My little sister and I were the patients, and I always had the exact same problem:  a broken leg.  And it seemed to me like that should’ve required some immediate attention.  But my younger sister out-foxed me every time.  She would call up on our little plastic phone and say, “Hi.  I can’t breathe.  When should I come in for an appointment?”  And of course, our receptionist would answer, “Right away!”  So, there I’d sit in our makeshift waiting room with my broken leg, silently cursing the corrupt nature of the medical profession and sure that my little sister had gotten in first because she had better insurance than I did.  It was just a no-win situation from the start.

I was also the kind of child who walked around shaking her head and deploring the sorry state of “kids today,” especially when it came to music. When I got my own room when I was a little kid, my parents gave me a radio to keep me company, and in my neighborhood, the kids all listened to The Jackson 5 and either Donny Osmond or David Cassidy.  You actually had to choose between Donny Osmond and David Cassidy because you just weren’t allowed to like both.  I have no idea why.  (My little sister, however, outsmarted everyone by liking Bobby Sherman).  I ostensibly went for Donny Osmond, but the truth is that even the Osmond Brothers were a little wild for me.  While everyone else was listening to Top 40 on the radio, I was listening to Ray Coniff and Perry Como.  I mean, I was an absolute easy listening music junkie.  I couldn’t get enough of that stuff.  I was a cranky 9 year-old senior citizen, a card-carrying curmudgeon plain and simple, and quite possibly, the oldest living child on earth.  

And I felt that I shared it all with Richard Nixon.  I’d look at his picture and kind of mumble to myself, “Mr. President, you’re the only one who really understands me.”

The culmination of it all was when my best friend and I decided to write letters to the President in 4^th grade.  The year before, three of my friends and I finally won a bet with one of the teachers who said that she would give 50 cents to anyone who could find a word without a vowel in it.  We finally came up with “mm-mm-mm” from the Campbell’s soup commercial, but we had to verify that Campbell’s actually thought of it as word before we could collect our winnings.  So, our teacher helped us write a letter to Campbell’s, they wrote back, and we did end up getting our 50 cents…which we had to split four ways.

But the idea that a kid could just write a letter to someone and that that someone might actually read it was empowering.  So, my best friend and I, heady with power and glee over the Campbell’s soup triumph, decided to aim for the top and write to the President.  I don’t recall what I wrote in my letter, but I think it was something along the lines of “Dear President Nixon, Hi, how’s it going?  I hope you are enjoying being the President and living in the White House.”  Of course, by the time we wrote our letters, Nixon had already begun to wade into the Watergate scandal and pretty much had economic problems running out his ears, so I doubt that he was enjoying being the President very much at that point and was probably thinking about how sad it was going to be to get evicted from the White House. 

Now, I can’t speak for my friend, but I myself had no clue about politics when I was in 4^th grade.  For all I knew, Watergate was the name of a town in Kansas.  And I wasn’t even all that sure where Kansas was.  I just knew that it wasn’t very close to me.  Writing that letter was really just about feeling like you could actually write to the President, and when we actually got some educational material and a key chain from the White House in response to our letters, my friend and I were utterly famous (at least at our elementary school) for about week (which is practically an eternity for a little kid).  And besides, it was Richard Nixon, my partner in all things curmudgeonly.

A couple of years after that, Santa Claus brought me a Van Halen record for Christmas, and I sort of started to loosen up and admitted to myself that Nixon had really just been a crutch for me.  Still, I would have liked to have had my grandfather’s framed picture of him for my own house if for no reason other than the nostalgia. 

In the end, I guess you can say what you want about Richard Nixon, but you can’t deny that if nothing else, he brought order out of chaos when it comes to President’s Day.  So maybe he really should be the face of that holiday.  Maybe little children should dance around on the third Monday of February clutching little stuffed Richard Nixon dolls and singing happy songs.  Maybe the perfect holiday vacation for President’s Day should be a trip to China, and maybe the perfect gift is a deluxe set of wiretapping equipment.  But whatever you do, don’t let President’s Day pass you by this year.  Take some time to really think about all that Richard Nixon has done for you.  And oh yeah, I guess you might as well give some passing thought to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, too.

Philosophy for a hungry planet.

Enjoy.

© R. Rissler, 2011.  All rights reserved.