“They laughed at Louis Armstrong when he said he was going to the moon, and now he’s laughing at them from up there.” Chazz Michael Michaels
The world has always scoffed at truly revolutionary ideas. Even those ideas that would one day become so ingrained in the culture as to feel that they somehow evolved organically as self evident truths. Were you to venture back through time you’d find a world full of people that would sooner burn you and your worthless life at the stake than consider for one second that the earth existed in a heliocentric environment. The information was in and we wouldn’t hear of anything different.
With this in mind I ask you to please consider the possibility that what I propose here may someday have merit. That it might someday be so commonly understood and practiced as to be considered orthodoxy. Without further adieu…
I propose that we should henceforth celebrate New Years Day on December 25th and Christmas on the first Saturday after December 29th.
The first point I’ll make is that this week, which can last as long as 13 days for kids on break from school or daycare and the parents that are responsible for them is awful. It just sits there at the end of the calendar year waiting to kill your energy at the precisely when it is the coldest, darkest and most inhospitable time of the year. If the sun shows up during these days it’s sure to disappear within 9 hours or so. Then to be gone for like 15 hours. We need to utilize the tools at our disposal in a more useful and efficient fashion.
Parents for millennia have been using Santa for their own nefarious and manipulative purposes. It’s great. We’ve even created spies for our made up arbiter of naughty and nice, our petty overlord who insists on our children’s adherence to standard codes of conduct. WHY THE HELL WOULD WE SHOOT THAT LOAD ON DAY ONE!
Furthermore, lets take advantage of this week off to truly recharge. Let’s take that first night and make it New Years Eve. Keep our little human alarm clocks up until midnight if possible. You need to adjust that version of the biological clock proactively if you hope to have any chance of sleeping in past 7:00 on a regular basis on your ‘break’. Besides, putting the motivator of toys and gifts at the end will help you readjust those clocks back to regular schedules when the interminable 52nd week finally ends. As it is now the incentive is for the kid to adjust their wake up time earlier right at the start. WHY THE HELL HAVE WE STOOD FOR THIS!
Now imagine the benefits for the early adopters. How does it sound to you to miss all that last minute shopping amidst the herds of people exactly like me who see shopping on the 23rd as getting ahead of the game. We all dread all the last minute shopping not because of the thought of buying all the fun last minute stuff we know will bring all the smiles and hugs you can handle. We dread it because of all the other people who similarly have to stuff stockings and make up for their lack of organization in a harried rush through the throngs at the last minute. Compare that to the laid back pace of casually scanning clearance bins while the throngs of consumers hoard the customer service desk with their returns. Their is the potential for getting great deals on chintzy crap that is only intended to last a month or two that would have cost double the week before. Not to mention the shopping at your local grocery on the 28th. You’ll be comfortably perusing produce for your giant family feast as the rest of the world stupidly goes about preparing to destroy their sleep patterns and ruin any of the restorative benefits of their time off right before returning to the rat race. Not you, you’ll show up on the 2nd raring to go. BE THE CHANGE YOU WISH TO SEE IN THE WORLD
We parents are often and by necessity bold thinkers determined to create a better world for the sake of our children. Let us not shirk our reponsibility we have. Do not allow future generations to look back and wonder why we didn’t fix this when the answer was so clear. Go forth. Make a difference.
Merry New Year! Happy Christmas!
developing dad 
You undersold this, it’s pretty good!
-made up arbiter of naughty and nice-
^genius!
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