{"id":72827,"date":"2019-12-18T05:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-12-18T11:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=72827"},"modified":"2019-12-15T16:46:39","modified_gmt":"2019-12-15T22:46:39","slug":"generic-holiday-product","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=72827","title":{"rendered":"Generic Holiday Product"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>There used to be more holidays.\u00a0 Nowadays, we&#8217;re down to a few Sales Events.\u00a0 I miss holidays.<br>George Washington had his own birthday holiday. We gave Valentines to classmates, planted a tree in the yard on Arbor Day, and hung construction paper cones on doorknobs on May Basket Day.\u00a0 \u00a0<br>The high school band marched in the Memorial Day parade.\u00a0 The school bell rang at 11:00 on Armistice Day as we sat silent for one minute. We knew who Squanto was and why he got invited to dinner by Pilgrims, the man carrying a musket while wearing a tall black hat with a shiny buckle on the front; the woman in a bonnet near a big, fat turkey.\u00a0 We put out our shoes for Saint Nicholas and sang familiar songs in the Christmas concert.<br>The musket violates the zero tolerance policy for guns. It&#8217;s unfair to celebrate one President&#8217;s birthday but not the others.\u00a0 Valentine was a Catholic saint, apartment dwellers have no yards to plant trees; parading on Main Street disrupts traffic and singing about a long-ago silent night converts schools into cathedrals.<br>We have cut ourselves off from our cultural traditions and wonder why our children have no sense of history, of belonging to a great nation, of pride in our culture.\u00a0 And I fear what happens to a people who have no sense of history, of belonging to a great nation, no culture.\u00a0\u00a0<br>Joe Doakes<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>The only mistake is to assume that this isn&#8217;t all according to plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There used to be more holidays.\u00a0 Nowadays, we&#8217;re down to a few Sales Events.\u00a0 I miss holidays.George Washington had his own birthday holiday. We gave Valentines to classmates, planted a tree in the yard on Arbor Day, and hung construction paper cones on doorknobs on May Basket Day.\u00a0 \u00a0The high school band marched in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72827"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72827\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72832,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72827\/revisions\/72832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}