This American Holiday.

In the nature of most of my blogspiration, I was having a conversation the other day with a friend and we were discussing St. Patrick's Day plans. This obviously lent itself into a general questioning of the phenomenon of the American holiday tradition and why and how we celebrate what we do. We concluded the following: The holidays that Americans choose to celebrate reflect a collective set of St. Values de Americana. The values that seem to be most prevalent throughout these holidays are the following:

-A lack of cultural knowledge and thus, a misinterpretation (St. Patrick's Day, Easter, Cinco de Mayo, Thanksgiving and Christmas)

that leads us to celebrate with...


-Greed and Consumerism (Valentine's Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas)

and typically, we find ourselves in a world of

-Overconsumption (St. Patrick's Day, Cinco De Mayo, Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas)

I can't possibly discuss what is ludicrous in the American interpretation of each of these days. Instead, I've narrowed my focus to the fascination of St. Patrick's Day, May 5th and that Thursday before Black Friday (another blog entirely based on nomenclature alone).

St. Patrick's Day
A day to celebrate our Irish brethren, right? Somehow we equate celebrate with violating another's person by inflicting a pinch of pain if they refused to incorporate green into their wardrobe. Then we laugh, boast, "But you're not wearing green!" and raise our glass to toast with a beer that has been dyed an awful murky green color that looks less than appetizing. Which in retrospect, I guess makes sense, because a lot of Irish food is unappetizing to look at. Note: Don't claim you are wearing green underwear because now you are turning this into more of a Mardi Gras holiday. Let's stick to some good clean fun of chasing Leprechauns around double rainbows to steal their pot o' gold.

Cinco de Mayo
For those of you who believed high school Spanish class was synonymous with nap time, I'm referring to the 5th of May. You know, that day where you leave work early to catch Happy Hour at oba! (PDX reference), break out that sombrero Chevy's gifted you on your last BDay and indulge in margs. All in the name of Mexico's independence...since we love and treat our southernly neighbor during non-5th of May days with adoration and care.

Americans, if we're so bent on commemorating Mexico's independence, try diez y seis de septiembre....if you've returned from your Labor Day weekend, that is.

Thanksgiving
Remember cutting out goldenrod sheets of construction paper shaped as buckles and attaching them to Abe Lincoln looking hats, all by way of your handy Elmer's glue stick? I do. The thought of it alone makes me want to order one from Amazon just to have one around to glue nothing in particular together, but just to inhale the scents of childhood.

Well, that smell is also one of ignorance.

How many 3rd grade teachers told the real story of Thanksgiving? Since I can't be sure that you were the recipient of false rhetoric emphasizing the blossoming friendship between the natives and the White people that "discovered" the new world and slaughtered a group of people in order to claim it as their own, I'll just account this as my own teaching. Imagine my bewilderment years later when I realized we revered this holiday as one to be thankful. I'm sure that is exactly what the Native's sentiment was. Thankful. They also probably saw it as a day where sometime in the distant future, a department store named Macy's would create enormous balloons and fly them in between skyscrapers of an imminent city called New York. Yes, that would be the epitome of symbolizing this occasion. Screw you mylar balloons, we made Shrek look like a real ogre.

[The parade is still awesome, don't get me wrong. My view on Thanksgiving 2008]

If we really wanted to honor Thanksgiving for what it were, then we'd take note from my favorite man, Jon Stewart:

"I celebrated Thanksgiving the old-fashioned way. I invited everyone in my neighborhood to my house, we had an enormous feast, and then I killed them and took their land."

Note: I am not condoning or encouraging murder. I'm just being authentic.

---

We really shouldn't have the audacity to complain and furthermore should feel slightly embarrassed when we publicly complain about the climbing numbers of childhood obesity or our doctors give us the "shocking" news of developing Type 2 diabetes (come on Paula, were you really surprised? You eat sticks of butta for breakfast), when we look at what we value. I mean, we chaperone our children on a pilgrimage of begging for candy from strangers while wearing a weird disguise around the neighborhood in the middle of the night. And what about the spring outdoor 'hunt' where we taunt and put them in competition with one another to find boiled food products and other chocolate candies scattered in the yard? "Tommy found the most eggs (chicken & cadbury), he wins! Now go inside and wash up for our Easter feast that we'll begin at 2 and end around 7."

The American girl in me does love to celebrate and in fact, I have been unsuccessfully pushing my friends to begin commemorating Flag Day (::crossing fingers:: Twenty-Twelve could be the year!). But I also feel shamed when we seem to have completely diluted any cultural meaning within a holiday. However, we are a young nation...as another friend of mine put it, "we are the teenagers of the world." If that's the case, rest assured. By our twenties we'll have it all figured out, right?

A Story of Speech, Seuss & Self-Esteem

My education in psychology is limited to Psych 201, which was literally the first class I ever took in college. Fall 2002, 9AM. That was almost 10 years ago. Oddly enough, I often find myself offering advice to friends when solicited [and sometimes unsolicited]. Recently, this has shifted into my professional life where I was faced with a student with an overwhelmingly low state of self-esteem and therefore is terrified of speaking in front of her classmates. Let's pause; I need to preface the nature of the class and how I approach this cruel mistress we call fear.

The apprehension in a public speaking class is palpable. Usually a good 80% of the class is completely petrified of the thought of standing in front of 30 of their peers, let alone having to share their ideas with them. So they look to me as a source of comfort and instead, before they make that long journey to the front of the class, this evil teacher greets them to the classroom with these words written on the board:

What is your biggest fear?

I'm sure a large number of them want to reply, "This class, you asshole," but I ask them to set aside the distress that the current class is causing them and to reach outside of that. The board ends up looking something like this:

Spiders

Rejection

Snakes

Failure

Heights

Disappointing Loved Ones

Clowns

Death

Escalators [true story]

I quickly assure them they will not die, this I am only 70% sure of, no clowns will be making cameos on speech day, our classroom will stay at the same altitude and I will pull the fire alarm if any spiders dare to invade our room. What I can't promise them are the two things they are most concerned about: Rejection and Failure.

So back to my student. We'll call her Lacy. Lacy told me very early in the term that she had incredibly low self-esteem. We've had a semi-ongoing conversation about it, but given the absence of a psychology degree and the limitation of only having 10 weeks to work-out much greater issues, I'm at a loss. Yesterday, she was in tears about her speech next week. Even with her best friend sitting right there assuring Lacy of her worth, she continued to shake her head and counter every positive statement with a negative.

"I don't like the things I say. I'm not funny. I'm not good at anything. I hate my voice, it's too deep."

I had to laugh at this last one. "Lacy, do you hear my voice? You know who else has a deep voice? My friend Oprah." 

I told Lacy that we all have our fears, yet she sees her fear as my strength. My fears are plenty. Some of them are rational and others I'm reminded I'm crazy for harboring, but they are real nonetheless. Lacy is afraid of being vulnerable and being exposed. I suffer from a similar affliction and this space allows me to work on that.

Negativity is only effective if you allow it to be; this is something I'm still learning. Unfavorable experiences give birth to the confines of a comfort zone and death to positive thought, when we really should be following those foolish aspirations we had as children before "can't," "never," and "won't" became regulars in our vocabulary bar. The only think we can speak in absolute certainty of is death. We will all die [probably not in front of your Public Speaking class], but our story has the promise to live on.

I have an obsession with stories. Both the telling and consuming, and the language that is used to share them. My friend Dr. Seuss and I were similar in that way. Today our calendars mark what would have been his 108th birthday. See how his stories are still being told? That's exquisite.

I spent the first two hours of today confined to my infatuation. I read for awhile. I wrote for awhile. Then I found myself here, writing more. I think Dr. Seuss would appreciate this type of morning. I wish I had more like it.

"You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.

Some windows are lighted. But mostly they're darked.

A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!

Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?

How much can you lose? How much can you win?"

-'Oh, the Places You'll Go!' -Dr. Seuss

Thanks for the fearlessness in your stories, Seuss.