1. Earth Day
The big daddy of nonsense holidays, Earth Day! Now, Earth Day has good ideas behind it. In my mind I imagine a bunch of hippies sitting around in a big circle and going you know the earth, man? Yeah. Yeah, that thing is cool. Which, you know, is fairly nice. Because the earth is pretty cool. And does need quite a bit of saving. But the main problem with it is that it is only a day, and a rather whiny one at that. By now I think that most of us agree that the world is so deep in awful things that it really is going to need a hell of a lot of saving. And that saving is not going to be done in a single day. People cannot all sit around in a big circle one day chanting save the earth! and guilt-tripping everybody and then go back to their ordinary, chaotic lives the very next day. If somebody is going to guilt-trip me then they cannot turn around and be a massive hypocrite the day after, that makes me feel slightly more like punching trees instead of hugging them. Another problem with it is that the soothing image that I have in my mind might actually be real in a rather disturbing way. I dont want to say that people who rabidly support Earth Day are the worst kind of hippies, but they really sort of are. U Thant, a former secretary general of the UN and so hopefully an at least vaguely sensible guy, even stated May there be only peaceful and cheerful Earth Days to come for our beautiful Spaceship Earth as it continues to spin and circle in frigid space with its warm and fragile cargo of animate life. What does that even mean? Spaceship earth? Animate life? It makes a person want to weep, and possibly punch a few more trees. Earth Day sounds like an extremely good idea in principle. But, like communism, in reality human stupidity takes over and were left with something that causes only mild despair. It would be far, far better if there was no preaching or hippies involved. And if, instead, we actually focused on teaching people that the earth will always need saving and will not actually be helped by a single day that comes once every rotation of the sun. Did we miss any other completely pointless holidays? Share your own picks below.