> SOUTHERN INDIANA — “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him.”

 — Abraham Lincoln

I think every person I heard talk about this year’s Fourth of July holiday lamented about how it was on a Wednesday. That was a bummer as it is always best for a holiday to fall on a Monday or a Friday — allowing for the ever popular long weekend off.

I don’t understand the calendar scheduling of holidays. We have rescheduled other holidays we once celebrated on a non-bookend weekday. For example, look what we did with the birthdays of our most beloved presidents. There was a time when we celebrated Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday. I suppose we simply had too many holidays so we combined it into simply President’s Day. It is now officially held on the third Monday of February. I am pretty sure that George Washington’s birthday did not fall on the third Monday during each February in his life. It is simply now a holiday of convenience.

Obviously, since many people call it the Fourth of July, the date becomes somewhat relevant to the holiday. However, officially it is called Independence Day. It seems like we could celebrate Independence Day any day of the year and hold with the same spirit and reverence for our patriotic celebration. How many would have liked to celebrate Independence Day on Friday, July 6, in the year 2012?

The most convenient fixed date we have for arguably our biggest holiday is for the birth of Jesus. The whole reason I bring up the religious reference is to explain that almost no historian or Biblical scholar will agree to the fact that Jesus was born on the 25th of December. This is possibly the most sacred of any Christian holidays [OK for some the resurrection around Easter celebrations — another date cloaked in suspicion]. During my Internet research one passage stated that Biblical scholars have separately come to the conclusion that Jesus could have in fact been born in any month of the year. So how did we come up with the 25th of December?

The best “fact” that I found was that a guy name Hippolytus — a presbyter [presbyter is like a priest or church elder] of the Roman Church sometime in the second century A.D. first claimed Dec. 25 to be the date of the birth of Jesus. Wow, this guy must have been quite persuasive for this to stick. If you want some very interesting reading, read some of the theories about the actual date of the birth of Jesus. The theories and evidence allow for the birth date to be literally all over the calendar.

I guess I have come a long way to make my point. All holidays should be declared to fall on a Monday or a Friday as the fixed date assigned is arbitrary for the most part. As long as we all agree and have long weekends, well that’s just fine with me.

I am requesting that we use Thanksgiving as our model. I can find no reason other than an arbitrary pick for the Thursday Thanksgiving holiday. There is no historical reason to be on a Thursday in the month of November. To accommodate this day most everyone gets the next day Friday off for the extra long weekend.

I am willing to compromise. Any holiday that doesn’t fall on a Monday or Friday is OK as long as the days after it until the next weekend or the days before it after the last weekend are added on as days off. This would have given all of us a five-day weekend either way.

I personally think I will celebrate Christmas, 2012 this year on Sept. 25 because many Biblical scholars have agreed that the most likely time of Jesus’ birth was in late September. Boy, am I going to avoid the Christmas shopping rush this year!



“Hey Barney, is that you?”

I cannot imagine anyone in their mid-50s or older who didn’t have a wave of nostalgia this past week with the passing of Andy Griffith and the corresponding retrospective of the Andy Griffith Show.

Quite simply in my opinion it was the best television show ever. I also thought Don Knotts and Andy Griffith had the best chemistry on television ever and that the show consistently had the best writing in a television series ever.

The true essence of the writing was proven simply by the facts that within a half hour’s span you could laugh hysterically and then suddenly somehow get a lump in your throat or a warm feeling in your heart. That, my friends, is the real genius of great writing.

My favorite Facebook posting of this week — The world needs more Andy of Mayberry and less Jersey Shore.



Lindon Dodd is a freelance writer and can be reached at lindon.dodd@hotmail.com