The holidaze of our lives

Mail & Guardian

16-05-2025

Mom's the word: The second Sunday in May, like Valentine's Day, has been hijacked by commercialism.
The past few months have been a disruptive time in the workplace.
It is a time of year with clusters of public holidays when calculating employees, who are supremely confident of their value to the company, take leave to maximise the number of days they get off.
Eagle-eyed HR will have taken note of the names of these foolishly misguided individuals.
The rest of us, more mindful of how precarious our positions are in the job market ('
The problem with these months is that there are just too many 'days': religious days, public holidays and those 'days' that started out with good intentions but have turned into orgies of crass commercialism.
Prime among these is Mother's Day, which was originally conceived as a celebration honouring motherhood. The day has different versions and dates all over the world but is predominantly rooted in religion.
Unfortunately, it was rapidly taken over by the cult of commerce. So much so that, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Anna Jarvis, who initiated the American version in the early 20th century, 'regretted this commercialism and expressed that this was never her intention'.
It is not that mothers don't deserve all the appreciation they can get. It is just that I resent being shown how to do this by mall business owners.
My dear mum is long gone, so I can only speak as a dad, but surely we have advanced far enough on the road to gender parity that this appreciation for mothers is shown throughout the year?
The tasks and responsibilities of parenting are equally shared. Making soggy sarmies for school lunches, mopping up spillages in the kitchen after the kids have made a meal of making a snack, finding missing items of clothing and, of course, meting out harsh punishments to badly behaved children.
This is just wishful thinking and the harsh reality is that many mothers do not get the recognition and love that they deserve. And this is where the supermarkets should step in. Instead of those yearly mass-marketing attacks to force families to shell out vast sums of money on Mother's Day, there should be year-round specials for mothers.
Calming tablets would be handed out to harassed mothers at the check-out counter, instant ready-made meals would be two for the price of one, a decent bottle of white wine would be half price and the price tag on a tray of those decadent Ferrero Rocher chocolate balls wouldn't shatter the credit card.
Just to kill any joy in Mother's Day you might have left after this diatribe, I must mention that if you go to a restaurant to celebrate, the smiling server might well be a mother.
If you need to do last-minute grocery shopping for the meal you are preparing, the patient woman at the till is more than likely a to be mother.
And if you forgot to buy a gift and rush to the mall, the helpful woman at the perfume counter is also probably a mother.
They all left their families at home to be hard at work on Mother's Day.
But whatever I say here, the bond between mother and child is special and deserves to be recognised.
Father's Day is not as big a deal as Mother's Day but is still seen as an opportunity for shop owners to ransack the family finances. So, my concept of year-round specials being preferable still applies.
If the outmoded gender identification must be adhered to, then the specials for dads would be in the beer aisle where a crate of Devil's Peak lager would be thirst-quenchingly cheap. And the butchery section would feature a slab of lamb chops at a mouthwatering price. The real macho throwbacks could jostle around the tasting table in the hot sauce aisle to show off their capacity to guzzle fiery condiments.
Rounding off the trio of egregious days is Valentine's Day, which began as a feast day honouring a martyr named Valentine. Now we are all slaves to the schmaltz and forced to feed on a diet of overpriced romantic dinners and gifts.
Exhibit one in my case is the frighteningly expensive bunch of roses that is deemed to be essential for the happiness of your sweetheart. Those jewel-like buds never really open to be fully fledged flowers and within two days are drooping, brown-tinged balls of misery. I rest my case.
For me, the best days are those that have real meaning for the majority of the population — and which don't involve the need to buy anything. Workers' Day, Youth Day and Freedom Day are good examples, with the added benefit of being real take-the-day-off-work days.
There can be no argument that the contribution of workers and the struggles of the labour movement deserve to be commemorated.
Youth Day is particularly significant, commemorating as it does the student uprising in Soweto on 16 June 1976. The bravery and sacrifices of the young people during those brutal and frightening times should never be forgotten.
And Freedom Day can truly be celebrated as a day of happiness because, no matter what has happened since, we will always have the sheer joy of voting in the first election of the newly liberated South Africa.
This barrage of days is enough to leave us dazed and confused and might even make us grateful for a normal five-day working week.
But, hold on, 13 May was International Hummus Day and we missed that completely!