We Need More Holidays
Black Friday should be a national holiday. The days directly following, and sometimes preceding major holidays, should all be national holidays. The fact that they’re not is stupid and offensive, and probably heretical.
I woke early the morning after Thanksgiving and got ready to go to the gym, only to find upon arriving that the gym was closed. So I had nothing to do but go to work without sore muscles and my happy hormone boost. Unpleasant and annoying as that was, it was also unfair. Why should the gym employees get the day off but I didn’t? Also, why does there really even need to be any gym employees present for me to work out there? It’s not as though they’re doing anything essential most of the time. Usually, there’s just one person at the desk, watching the day, at most barely saying hello. So why close at all? Just let me use the weights and machines with little to no interactions with other human beings, like any other day.
I’m not mad at the gym staff, of course. And I’m sorry to belittle their job. But, damn it, I wanted to work out. And, more importantly, I didn’t want to go to work. My fiancee and I had a lovely Thanksgiving. We went skiing/snowboarding with a couple friends in the morning, spent the afternoon cooking, and then ate so much food, of such high carbohydrate, sugar, and tryptophan content that I felt on the verge of being very sick and passing out. The soreness from being a brand new lil baby snowboarder, and the coma the food put me in, gave me no motivation, or the ability to justify, going to work. I should have been allowed to stay home, like those gym employees, like everyone should be able to. The day after Thanksgiving should be a day of peace and recovery for everyone. No one should be at work. Everyone should be on their couches recuperating. It should not be up to the largesse of employers to decide whether or not their employees have to work on Black Friday, and should instead be a paid national holiday for all. If it’s for some reason unavoidable and essential that some people do work, they should be paid overtime.
This should, of course, not only apply to Black Friday. Christmas Eve is, in everything but nationally recognized legal fact, a holiday. It should be treated like a holiday. Everything should be closed and no one should have to work. Like Black Friday, the day after Christmas should also be treated as a holiday, to recover from the happy pains of the holiday itself. Christmas should be a three-day block of a paid holiday. The fact that our country is run in large part by a bunch of idiot Christo-fascists, and this isn’t already a thing, is offensive. How dare they force us to work on the day before and after they pretend Jesus was born? Do you think Mary was working those days? I know women were treated as property and basically agency-less vessels back then, but I sure hope not.
We should all enjoy the rest and recovery time that the mythical mother of a magical savior baby was undoubtedly entitled to. Anyone who opposes such an idea, and any employer who forces their employees to work on such days, will surely be condemned to hell. And rightly so.