Favorite Holiday?

What is your favorite holiday? Why is it your favorite?

I’m not a big holiday person. If you check out my YouTube channel (stephenschrum) you’ll see several videos of anti-Christmas songs. While buying flowers I (secretly and silently) agree that Valentine’s Day is a holiday created by retailers for profit. And most other holidays, which should be celebrating something positive about humanity, are generally accompanied by the store sales that overshadow them.

Also, check out my blog post about why Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is evil.

Now, on the positive side, I do like the Fourth of July, partly for patriotic reasons, and partly because it’s in the summer and can’t be ruined by snow. But there’s actually another reason, rooted in a memory from a few decades ago.

I still like fireworks. I like sitting as close to as I can, and being under them is the best. I feel like I’m being transported to the Big Bang, the origins of creation. There is nothing intellectual about the appreciation of fireworks; it’s all color, sound, and emotion, and is more ephemeral than theatre.

When I was at the summer arts camp, we took the campers off to a fireworks display. We were sitting in the bleachers of an outdoor stadium, and I found myself sitting next to a little red-headed girl; I think her name was Laura. She was the ideal of what I thought my daughter would be when I had one. As we sat there, I put my arm around her, and we enjoyed the fireworks together.

As time went on, it turned out that I never did have any children, so that experience has always stood out as a time of hope and optimism, and simultaneously as a symbol of profound regret.

It occurs to me as I write this that some people would have seen us and thought negative things about the 27-year old with his arm around a little girl. The world has changed, but I’m glad that, at the time, no one questioned my pure motives of wishful thinking.

And to end on a dark note: there are fireworks stores everywhere that never seem to do any business. How do they stay open, or is there money laundering going on? I just always have to wonder. Though on the positive side, I did have a student actor who worked at one and had plenty of time to learn his lines for shows I cast him in.

On the meta level, I think I just wrote a blog post that resembles a fireworks display: all sorts of different things juxtaposed in a single experience. Bang! Boom! Pffffft…Bang!

Your comments (or evidence of money laundering)? I’d love to hear your thoughts, and please like and follow!