With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, we begin to reflect on the pointless holidays in this country. Personally, I feel like we can group the main U.S. holidays into three categories. We begin with the “Patriotic Holidays”that we use as a reason to get drunk at the lake for no real reason. In this group we find Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day. Admittedly, you can’t be at the lake for all of the “Patriotic Holidays” that we use as a reason to close school and give people off work for the day. President’s Day, Columbus Day, and Veteran’s Day are all minor events in our lives when we are looking at the grand scheme of things. It is important that I in no way am trying to discredit the weight that some of these holidays hold for some people. 

The second grouping of holidays falls under religiously and historically based holidays. These are the big ones that everyone knows and that we as a country tend to prioritize. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and holidays of a similar nature. It is important to point out with this group that we as a country often do a poor job at highlighting and paying attention to holidays of this nature that are celebrated by what we consider minority cultures and religions in this country. Additionally, with these holidays, we overlook the negative consequences that come with the celebration. Looking at Christmas as an example, this time of year comes with a lot of negative, hard to handle emotions. Families and people dealing with personal loss, financial issues, increased stress, family turmoil, in addition to a long list of other negative consequences often go invalidated during these times. Another key downside to these holidays is the global impact they have. Thanksgiving is a day for us to promote unhealthy eating standards, unnecessarily waste food, and minimize the colonization of indigenious people. Christmas creates a reason to destroy millions of trees that lead to environmental impacts, promotes capitalist beliefs, and leads to unrealistic social expectations. 

The third group of holidays is what I would call “Holidays That Make Absolutely No Sense but Have A Small Amount of Validity.” Examples here are St. Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Day, Halloween, and Valentine’s Day. Hallmark and other card companies, restaurants and major stores are the main people who benefit from these holidays. We are being tricked into spending money to “celebrate” occasions we could choose any day to celebrate. If you have a partner, you should not need a special holiday to express that love. If you are of Irish descent, you should be proud of that every day, and if you aren’t of Irish descent you should just admit that this holiday is completely pointless. 

I want to end this by saying that my opinions here are not meant in any way to discredit the weight and meaning that certain holidays hold for people. You are your own person and have the right to valid feelings about what holidays represent to you. I simply used this as a way to shed some light on the overromanticed relationship we have created with holidays in this country.