’Tis the season, the holiday season, where rounds of parties could mean every day feels like a holiday. That’s because every day is holiday, according to Thomas and Ruth Roy.
The Roys, native Pennsylvanians and owners of Wellcat Holidays & Herbs, decided the existing catalog of holidays wasn’t as comprehensive as it could be. Every day should be an opportunity to celebrate life. So, the Roys began inventing holidays to celebrate even the most mundane of days. Tom Roy’s first invention was Northern Hemisphere Hoodie-Hoo Day, a fictitious event for a radio show he hosted at the time. On a whim, he submitted his holiday to “Chase’s Calendar of Events,” a publication that’s been in print since 1958 and is known as the most authoritative reference available on special events, holidays, federal and state observances, historic anniversaries and more. The entry was accepted. As a result, a town in Texas and several Pennsylvania municipalities now officially observe the Feb. 20 Hoodie-Hoo holiday by going outdoors at high noon and yelling “Hoodie-Hoo” to chase winter away, a month before the official start of spring.
Roy did not stop with the one holiday. He went on to create 80 whimsical, wacky holidays now listed in Chase’s tome.
The point? Today, Nov. 20, is Name Your PC Day.
It seems a ludicrous idea — at first. But people name their cars, they name their homes and they name their plants. So, what’s wrong with naming a computer? The tasks your computer performs on a daily basis are quite intimate, after all: it handles your correspondence and takes dictation. It keeps track of your appointments and reminds you of important birthdays and anniversaries. It knows your friends and relatives and keeps pictures of them all. Computers are the secretaries of our technologically packed lives. They should have names.
So, go name your PC (or Mac). Happy Name Your PC Day!
And don’t forget to mark your calendar for Dec. 21, Humbug Day, in which you’re given permission to vent freely, and loudly, about the holidays.