HOLIDAY-OF-THE-MONTH : June Has Brides, Dads and Grads, but What It Needs Is a Day Off With Pay
June has been a time for brides, dads and grads. And yet it continues to be something of a letdown in the month department. Southern California Junes are particularly disappointing because of a climatic quirk sadly obvious to anyone who’s ever gone to school here. Just when the great iron gates of the academy clang shut for summer vacation, bang! The skies turn to a gray murk, a canopy of overage underwear, and the rays you waited for all spring make only a mid-afternoon cameo appearance. Hey, kid, the joke’s on you; you might as well get a job.
This joke comes with its own topper: blazing sun and temps, oh, in the high 90s just as soon as school resumes in September. You’d think the school calendar, just some pixels on a computer screen, might have been adjusted to the less flexible dictates of the environment. And you’d be wrong.
But the problem with June goes beyond our nutty little climate. It’s a great, aching flaw in the calendar. Every year, we are primed for an agreeable pattern: Starting in January, with New Year’s Day, and stretching through May, with the lovely and talented Memorial Day, Americans come to expect a paid holiday every month. True, March and April have to share Easter, but the late winter/early spring cold is always good for an ad-hoc day off.
August has no holidays, but everyone’s on vacation, so there’s no work to take off from. The pattern picks up again in September, Labor Day leading us inexorably to Christmas. The big hole in the year is June: full of occasions, empty of holiday.
Congress, moving every possible holiday to Monday, may have assumed it would eventually get around to Father’s Day. But, unless the NBA makes its playoffs end even later in the year, a Monday Father’s Day just wouldn’t work. There aren’t enough first-class sports events in mid-June. What are dads supposed to do all that Monday--turn off the TV?
Nothing else in the month shows major-holiday potential. Flag Day could be promoted, but it’s too close to the Fourth of July. Eventually they’d end up being smooshed together, Presidents’ Day-style, into an impossibly vague patriotic holiday at the turn of the month.
Is Arbor Day in June? Just asking the question shows how far out of the running it is. Graduation Day could go major league. There’s a plausible Big Premise in it: a day on which we take time to honor the future of our country. But we know how hard it would be to rejigger school calendars so that everyone graduated on the same day. And, given the state of our schools, we probably don’t care that much about the future of our country.
The hippies tried to revive the old pagan favorite, the summer solstice, but the timing’s wrong. Not astronomically--I assume that hasn’t changed. But summer movies and summer cola commercials start weeks earlier. Solstice would be a celebration of old news. June is also Dairy Month--Cow Day?--and, according to a billboard along the Sunset Strip, June is Comedy Month. Laugh Day? It sounds like something out of one of Kurt Vonnegut’s lesser fantasies.
June can be fixed only by radical means. Move an existing contender from its current month, or create a new festivity.
Columbus Day is begging to be moved. It gets totally lost in the shuffle as the anticipation builds for Halloween. Which would you rather do: go to a Columbus Day parade or shop for a costume? But there is a major problem with getting Columbus Day shifted to June. It takes a fairly broad political coalition to push across a fiction like a new date for a real occasion (it took centuries to move Christmas), and, although the notion would have seemed droll a few years ago, Columbus is now on the verge of being more controversial than Martin Luther King Jr.
There is one new holiday it would make sense to create. This idea might have been more appealing back before bankruptcy court became more crowded than the 605 at 6 p.m. But give it a chance. Summer ends, does it not, with Labor Day? Would it not be fair, in the same way that fathers got equal time with the pioneering Mother’s Day, to open the summer with Management Day? It would be a tribute to the entrepreneurial spirit, and the corporation-running spirit that eventually replaces it. Parades of people in their business attire. Pageants enacting great moments in the lives of GM and Sears. Perhaps the Vice President laying a wreath at the tomb of the unknown personnel director.
I’d stay home from work for that.
