All posts tagged with "holidays"

I was planning a nice little post-Thanksgiving wrap up post this week, but I checked my phone yesterday and realized that dispite having my whole family (minus the grade-school twins) together in one place at the same time, I don't have a single picture. For someone with a renewed dedication to documenting his life online, this is a criminal level of negligence.

This morning, I found a data set with all of the data for Billboard's Hot 100 charts. So I did what nerds do. Ko has started up with the Christmas songs already, so I looked at the most interesting chart history I can think of.

Now that I don't have to get a kid up and make him get ready for school, I can start my mornings with long walks with the dog. It's been nice to take in the neighborhood Christmas decorations at a walking pace. But this week, I noticed a couple of decorations whose seasonality is questionable:

Every year, the NCAA basketball tournament, St. Patrick, and perfect Spring temperatures conspire to make this the best weekend of the year. Either the basketball or the St. Patrick's day parade alone would make this a big deal for me, but the combination of the two make this bigger than Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's Day, or the highly overrated Fourth of July. Heck, it might eclipse all of the fun in those days combined.

Today is that most contrived of American holidays, Cinco de Mayo. At least in the U.S., this seems only to be a celebration of Mexican restaurants. I'm not sure about other parts of the country, but at least in my town, Cinco de Mayo celebrations were started by Corona advertising, and local Mexican restaurants jumping on the bandwagon with specials.