Road Apples by Tim Sanders
April 26, 2010

Hurry up and celebrate April before it's gone


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We Americans love to celebrate. We will celebrate all things, great and small, and make a lot of commotion doing it.

Last Thursday, as I was fortifying myself with cashews and orange soda before writing this week’s column, I noticed a couple of email comments from folks who were celebrating Earth Day. Earth Day, in case you didn’t know, was created in 1970 by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, who, after a great deal of senatorial research, discovered that he was the very first United States senator named Gaylord. During a completely different investigation, he also discovered that there were no really important holidays being celebrated on April 22.

So for forty years, people young and old–people committed to greenness and environmentalism and rain forests and mulch and soil–have gathered on college campuses and in city parks across the nation on that date to celebrate Mother Earth and her bounties. Some celebrate by digging small handfuls of earth and watching in wonder as it sifts through their fingers, others bring their own earth from home in Mason jars, but all eventually lock arms, sing Kumbaya, and leave huge piles of rubble so that city sanitation workers will all be able to benefit from a little overtime pay.

But Earth Day has come and gone, and by now most of us have moved on, searching for something else to celebrate. So, to be timely we must discuss holidays celebrated on the last week of April. Which this week is. Here are some:
 

APRIL 24 - Inspired by Senator Nelson, there was a grassroots effort to declare April 24, 1971, National Wind Day, in honor of all of the contributions made to our society by the U.S. Congress. And speaking of Congress, April 24 is also National Pigs-in-a-Blanket Day. If you don’t care to celebrate pork wrapped in biscuit dough, you may want to celebrate April 24 as the day in 1969 when Paul McCartney held a press conference to publicly announced that there was no truth to the rumor that he was dead. Since some in the press corps thought he might have been lying, he was later given a polygraph.

APRIL 25 - On April 25, 1969, Ringo Starr was urged to follow McCartney’s lead, so he also announced publicly that Paul McCartney was most certainly not dead, and poked his friend with a large hat pin to prove it. Regardless, most fans still celebrate April 24 as the official Paul McCartney Not Dead Yet Day. This is also National Telephone Day. We suspect that the holiday was created before the cell phone arrived to annoy perfectly innocent Americans in doctors’ offices and check-out lines everywhere.

APRIL 26 - Yes, on April 26 most Americans still gather with family members and close friends to celebrate National Pretzel Day. If you don’t care to celebrate pretzels with your family, you might prefer to join millions of Americans who gleefully commemorate April 26, 1992 as the date when ABC’s last episode of “Growing Pains” was finally aired.

APRIL 27 - This is National Walter Lantz’s Birthday Day. Walter Lantz probably had more influence on modern society than anyone else named Walter, including Cronkite, since he was the cartoonist who created Woody Woodpecker and his nephew and niece, Knothead and Splinter. Woody’s nephew and niece, that is.

APRIL 28 - Known as National Poetry Reading Day, this holiday was repealed by Congress in 1998 due to its connection with an alarming spike in the national homicide rate. In 2005 the holiday was reinstated, but renamed National Poetry Reading Excluding Anything by William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, or Sylvia Plath Day.

APRIL 29 - NATIONAL ZIPPER DAY! On April 29, 1913, Gideon Sundback patented his “Hookless Fastener No. 1,” which later became known as the “zipper.” Each April 29, senior athletes with malfunctioning prostates and other “going problems” gather in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the invention that removed the traditional button-up fly from their wardrobe and allowed them to get at their plumbing with minimal effort. A crowd favorite at the National Zipper Day festivites is always the dramatic Bathroom Stampede and Zipper Time Trials, which many believe will soon become an Olympic event.

APRIL 30 - April 30 is National Hairstyle Appreciation Day. But before you get all caught up in the holiday spirit and say something stupid like: “Hey Bob, that chartreuse mullet of yours sure gives you an air of casual sophistication!” you should know this: April 30 is also National Honesty Day. It commemorates the date in 1742 when young George Washington told his father “Yes, father I cannot tell a lie. I personally chopped down your cherry tree with my own little hatchet. Oh yeah, and since I’m being perfectly honest, that powdered mullet on your head makes you look really goofy!”


There are other holidays in the last week of April. There’s National Arbor Day, for instance, which has a variable date due to the fact that sometimes arbors bloom early, and sometimes later. If your yard has an arbor, and if it’s blooming, feel free to celebrate whenever you please. Unless you live in Columbus, Ohio. Arbor Day or no Arbor Day, nobody celebrates an arbor in Columbus.