Barometer
Happy Extra Holidays
For some time now, Canadians have been asking politely for an extra winter holiday, something to break up the dark days between New Years and Easter.
Fall is fine, what with Labour Day, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Novembrance Day and, of course, Grey Cup Sunday. Then sliding nicely into Christmas and Boxing Day, a two-fer, and January 1 just a week away.
With Easter slipping all over the calendar, it can seem like ages before the next stat.
There are numerous excellent reasons to have a holiday in February, and I am here to urge Canadians, especially northerners, to start agitating on this. Forget about calm requests and well-thought-out arguments.
First of all, there is February 4, the anniversary of the death of Antoine-Joseph Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, in 1894. That is worth a pause! A rest, if you will.
Canadians will be encouraged to sleep in a bit, to wake mid-afternoon (which is daybreak for beatniks) to the soft, soothing sounds of brass played low and slow. A beret, a black turtleneck, a breakfast of black coffee, jammin’ at dusk, and we’re done.
Soothed into the two, man, it’s cool.
Or, if ya don’t dig jazz, here’s this. Is there anything more dreary than the first Monday morning in February? It is dark, it’s cold, and there are many more Monday mornings to drear through. Let’s call it Blue Monday, and take the day off.
Start off with blueberry pancakes for breakfast, or if you wake late, try blueberry pie at lunch. Have a very rare steak for supper. Listen to BB King and feel good ’bout feelin’ sad.
I’m telling you, if we are successful in getting either of these stats, music festivals will spring up all over the country, bringing much needed dollars into local economies. As long as someone shows up. You never know, they might be feeling too blue or too cool to do so.
Which is all right by me.
There is a sorta-kinda more-or-less official holiday on February 15 called Flag Day. So far, it doesn’t have legs; it’s going nowhere. We go to work and sometime during our break we might think about how great it is to have a flag, I guess. I’m not keen on this one unless it becomes an actual Paid Day Off, in which case I would be pleased to hand out tiny paper and plastic flags all Valentine’s Day, then toast the colours before knocking off early.
Here’s our last great hope for a truly Canadian February Stat holiday: Leap Year Day. It is the ultimate in Canadian compromise, because it happens only once in a while, and has tax implications.
February 29 appears every fourth year, and means an extra day of pay for employers. Then the employer has to pay payroll taxes, and the employee has to pay into EI, and if you go shopping with that extra days’ pay, there’s PST and GST. I suggest we all take the day off with no pay. Come on! Let’s simply erase it from the calendar: no work, no pay, no chiropractic appointments. Nada.
A free day, an empty space, a great white north, a tabula rasa.
Great for procrastinators, as we’ll be able to say, “Oh, yeah, I was gonna do that last 2/29, but, you know, you can’t schedule anything for Leap Day.”
I suspect that, in time, most unions will negotiate the day as a paid stat. I see the possibility that co-workers, neighbours and relatives will begin to plan for it and have events you really cannot miss. Maybe there will be, over the years, special foods assigned, or perhaps gift-giving or other ceremonies. Perhaps it will become sister-in-law day, although I really hope not.
I would suggest here that we who wish to goof off an extra day get organized, write letters, sign petitions, and march in rallies — but that seems like an awful lot of work.
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