Oh, I say and I say it again, ya been had! Ya been took! Ya been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray! Run amok!
– Malcolm X (1992)
It happens every year and every year, as a people, we all fall for it and there’s really no good reason besides tradition and what we’ve been told and what was done before.
A person’s birthday is classified as an important day. I’ve heard that the day is probably more important to the woman that carried the child to term, that no longer has excess weight to carry around pushing on and around inside her. But it’s been deemed important for the product of her labor.
However, have you ever waited until midnight for it to be your birthday, then celebrated at 12:01?
I’ve only been around 40 years, but that’s a practice I’ve never heard of. But we’re all set to countdown to midnight to welcome in ‘the new year’. This is a “time-honored tradition” that’s as ludicrous as the two holidays that preceded it.
Christmas seems like a pagan holiday with presents and a tree indoors, but for some reason it was co-opted by the Christians to celebrate the birth of Jesus…as eliquently stated by Huey Freeman.
As for Thanksgiving, it’s hard to believe the same people that crosssed the ocean for ‘religious freedom’ and broke bread with the Native Americans were willing to kill and swindle those same people from their land.
A more likely story would be that most everything you learned about Thanksgiving was wrong. If you’re willing to go a little further down the rabbit hole, the Manataken American Indian Council say the day was actually the celebration of a massacre of 700 members of the Pequot Tribe who gathered for their Green Corn Harvest festival and were killed instead.
For the sheer numbers of gathered people on New Year’s Eve, it’s a wonder there aren’t more murders. There are certainly enough crimes. Years ago, I was with friends on the streets close enough to Times Square to see the ball drop, but not cluttered within the masses.
We watched the ball drop and wandered away from the gathering. I had parked my car on the street and when me and my friend walked back, we noticed a few gentlemen walking away from the car with items that looked familiar.
Needless to say, they had broken into my car and would spend the next two hours dealing with the authorities to get my stuff back after the cops picked them up. It was the start of a wild weekend that included a trip to Philadelphia, an inspiring speech about living for the moment and not wasting our youth and a return to New York City.
But all that took place in January. While we wouldn’t have gathered without the excuse of New Year’s, the events that took place afterwards were in truth the actions of young people with the freedom of vacation. That they happened around the New Year was just a coincidence.
But the coincidence doesn’t excuse the excuse that is the celebration of a clock turning to midnight on a specific day during a specific time on the calendar that we creataed and have universally decided is so.
It’s a marketing device, one that sellers of merchandise have determined to use to their advantage with countless types of sales and discounts and clearance and countless other methods to get you into their store.
But you can’t argue with the results with retailers seeing their biggest increase in sales since 2011. So despite the standard setbacks, the con is working.
And the biggest con is still to come when in a couple of days, strangers and friends alike will gather and eventually watch a clock of some sort or a pixelated object ‘falling’ to signify the end of the countdown.
Those same strangers will purchase dinner and drinks and gifts for people they don’t know half as well as they should like; and likely like less than half of them half as well as they deserve.
So needless to say I don’t plan to pay attention to midnight. But I will be taking advantage of those looking to pay top dollar for a car-ride service with elevated prices due to the holiday and that’s the truth.
Martin Kester - My Digital World 