What on Earth does it Mean? Are you Ready?
Spring holidays are confusing with varying days and dates of celebrations, differing views on historical facts and even disagreements on what they should be called.
For 2011, Easter, Administrative Professionals Day and Mother’s Day fall within a two week span. Shoppers and Retailers alike hope this isn’t a marketing dooms day scenario.
They can’t say they didn’t have time to prepare for Easter this year. This is the latest that it can occur. It is the most significant day on the Christian calendar. The date has been set for the major Christian denominations since A.D. 325 when the Council of Nicaea came up with a formula. They decreed its celebration of the day of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ to be on Sunday following the paschal full moon or the full moon just after the Spring equinox. Even that is a judgment call. It is the same moon but the time zones around the globe differ. So an approximation is used. In fact the date is tied to the Jewish Calendar because of the association with the Passover. The Last Supper was on Holy Thursday just prior to Good Friday and then finally the Resurrection on the Lord’s Day, Sunday.
Even that isn’t the same all over the world. Western Christians use the Gregorian calendar that hangs on your refrigerator. Eastern Orthodox Christian like say in Greece or Russia never changed from the Julian calendar.
At least good old Administrative Professionals Day is celebrated on the same day. That is unless you call it Secretary’s day as it was first called on the day of its birth in 1952. Or you may also call it Executive Admins Day. For still others it is Administrative Assistants Day. But a rose by any other name is still an apple. Right. At least it is always celebrated smack dab in the middle of National Secretaries Week or whatever you call it. Retailers like it because employers are supposed to buy large supplies of flowers, cards, gift certificates, cashable gift cards and take the APs, EPs or the plain old secretary out to lunch as some already are anyway.
Just two weeks after Easter this year in the United States we will celebrate Mother’s Day- Another major holiday worshipped by retailers around the globe. Talk about confusion as to names and dates. Dear old Mom’s Day is officially celebrated in 53 different nations under different titles and on days scattered from February 13 in Norway to December 22nd in Indonesia.
Among the countries of the British Empire, it is known as Mothering Day. A larger number have followed the American model and will be celebrating on May 8th as God intended it.
Regardless of what you are celebrating or why the Retailers of the World have one message for you. Save the world. Get out there and buy those gifts now before it is too late and the capitalistic world as we know it comes to an end and drifts into chaos as if it hasn’t already.
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