National Pro-Life Cupcake Day. Photo: Facebook
Advertising is a big industry these days and it's becoming harder and harder for the average citizen who's disproportionately enthusiastic about a marginal issue to afford promotional material.
Luckily, inventing a fake national holiday is almost free: all you have to do is pick a date, build a website and send out a press release, and hey presto, the 16th of July is now National Picking Your Nose While Listening to Usher Day. Soon people will be falling over themselves to recognise your solemn holiday without you having to pay for a television commercial, radio spot or street team of backpackers with flyers and matching branded t-shirts.
National Day Calendar, a list of some 1500 bizarre American holidays, contains some real gems. Did you know April 9th is Cherish an Antique Day? Or that September 15th is National Felt Hat Day? What a time to be alive.
Although I largely approve of these patently ridiculous holidays, there are a few that taint this noble practice by being really dumb. Since I'm a positive person who loves to make a contribution, I've suggested a few ways we can go about maintaining the stellar reputation of made-up advertising holidays.
Change National Fragrance Day to National Stop Putting On Perfume On The Bus Day
National Frangrance Day, celebrated on March 21 each and every year for no good reason, is a full day to recognise perfume, aromatherapy oils and Potpourri for the ruinously expensive and frequently unpleasant contribution they make to our lives. Well, frankly, who cares. Perfume already costs hundreds of dollars and it's not like the industry has gone into a slump, seeing as it's well supported by Christmas, Valentine's Day and whenever you need to say sorry to your honey for a particularly severe stuff-up. Instead, let's have a day to reinforce a marginalised social norm: don't put perfume on while you're inside a confined space with other people. The only exception to this rule is if the confined space is an anosmia ward full of people who are physically unable to detect scent and, even then, wait until the non-anosmic doctors and nurses have left the room.
In every other instance, this habit is a disrespectful imposition on people's personal space. There are generally two categories of offenders: women who are late for a job interview and spritz themselves on the go, and teenage boys spraying themselves with Lynx on the way home from soccer practice. At least people who fart on the bus have a good excuse: they're disgusting stinky victims who can't control their own actions.
Replace National Pro-Life Cupcake Day with National Get Fifteen Abortions Day
If you've read this far, you're probably not the kind of person who would be in the target audience for National Pro-Life Cupcake Day and I don't have to explain why this is a bad holiday. To be honest, it was a toss-up between National Get Fifteen Abortions Day and National Infiltrate The Pro-Life Movement Day, but getting fifteen abortions on the same day just seems easier. I encourage everyone who considers the prospect of an entire 24 hours devoted to pro-life cupcakes to get exactly fifteen abortions on October 9th because it's the only thing that would offend the anti-abortion cupcake enthusiast crowd as much as they offend me.
Replace National Steak and Blowjob Day with National Shank A Perv With Your Stiletto Day
National Steak and Blowjob Day? Are you kidding me? Why didn't these people just name their holiday National Patriarchy Day and be honest about it? Instead, it's got this plausibly deniable ironic tone to it, which seems purposely engineered so that if any narky femmos get cranky they can claim women just don't get the joke. Well, National Steak And Blowjob Day is an absolute disgrace and the people who organise it should be forced to live out the rest of their days as rape crisis hotline workers or unpaid comforters serving people who have just had difficult Pap smears. National Shank A Perv With Your Stiletto Day is much more productive for everyone except people who are celebrating National Steak and Blowjob Day, who will undoubtedly comprise a large segment of the perv population that gets shanked.
Replace National Pink Day with National Colourless Void of Despair Day
According to the Holiday Insights website, National Pink Day is "especially a day for the ladies, as pink is a girl's favorite colour". After coming across this holiday I sank into a neurotic state of misery because I couldn't figure out how anyone could, in 2015, say anything that regressively sexist without experiencing a shame overload and wailing themselves to death. It's not that I have anything against pink or women who like pink; I count myself as one of them. Pink is a great colour! It's cheerful, bright and mood-lifting. I wear it a lot, I purposely grow pink flowers and I often find myself enticed to buy women's versions of fundamentally unisex products just because the packaging is pink.
The tragedy of this holiday is that instead of promoting the colour pink's virtues, it sublimates pink to its misogynistic agenda. Since that agenda is still widely accepted, any holiday celebrating pink will inevitably be interpreted as support for a sexist reading of pinkness. Thus, the only solution is to promote despair and ennui at the status quo, in the hope that bringing this sad state of affairs to people's attention will bring them around to a radical, humanist and pink-positive agenda.
