April 20th is NOT a "holiday"...

I know I'm in the minority, but I tend to take the word "holiday" in its literal interpretation, as a "holy day."  There is something special about that day that separates it from the rest of the regular calendar.  We give it a higher estimation in our reckoning of our time here in these bodies.  Also, "holidays" are always celebrations of something Good.  The Bad things we commemorate with "memorials" or "rememberances", but never with holy days.

And because of my peculiarly literal take on the concept, I have always had a hard time celebrating 4/20 as a holy day, even when I was regularly meditating at the altar of The Bowl, The Bong, and The Cannabinoid.  It just seems so...base, to me.  It'd be like having an "Eat Junk Food and Jerk Off" day and calling it "holy" or "special".  Just seems wrong, somehow.  Admittedly, of all the different ways of poisoning ourselves for pleasure, that really is the only one that could even come close to deserving it's own holiday.  (Can you imagine a Smack, Crack & Crystal holiday?  How about a Nicotine day?  Though I do tend to always be sure to have a drink on Repellation Day.)  ;-)  It's definitely the least of all of those evils, but it's still technically an evil, so why would we want to celebrate it?

But I still do celebrate it.  (Though I celebrate in a different way now than I used to.)  I celebrate it because a "hippie holiday" of getting stoned and laughing your tits off is SO MUCH BETTER than all of the other things this day represents to so many people.

Hitler was born on April 20th, and so this is a holy day, indeed, to thousands and thousands of monsters with human faces who poison our species with violence and hatred.  Taking their holiday away from them, as the catholics took xmas from the heathens, can only be a Goodness.

Two of those monsters in particular chose this day eleven years ago to stage a massacre at a Colorado high school.  They brutally murdered children, and they had fun doing it.  And they were just children themselves.  And they chose this day specifically because it was Hitler's birthday AND because it was the "hippie holiday;" they wanted to attack the "peace & Love" crowd that they despised so much, and they wanted to re-brand the day and turn it into something horrifying.  And, unfortunately, they succeeded in doing just that for hundreds of families.  I don't want to give them the satisfaction of doing it to me, too.

So, no, it's not a true "holiday."  But I don't think that matters much, in the end.  Taking a day of tragedy and horror and turning it into a celebration of joy, even self-destructive joy, is still a Goodness, and one that I will continue to take part in, for as long as I can.