When rfts and I had first moved to Ohio, we interacted by a checkout girl at the supermarket asking us what we were doing for Sweetest Day. We stared at her, and rfts said, in the confused and vaguely frightened tones someone who has just been handed literature about the Queen of England's association with the lizard people, "Um. Nothing?" But hey, if black slaves in Texas get their own holiday, why not candy manufacturers in the Great Lakes region?
But I never heard of "Sweetest Day" till I moved to Ohio (and I lived in Michigan when I was in elementary school and I went to University of Michigan).
In Ohio, Sweetest Day is often marked by celebratory games of Cornhole.
2: The University of Michigan is exactly where I heard of it. Bursely dorm, twas the year aught ninety-five.
Is this the sort of holiday where people get the day off. There's been a controversy about Boston city workers getting Bunker Hill day off, because it costs $5 million dollars, and they want to stem the losses.
They even briefly mentioned stopping the observation of Evacuation Day, the celebration of the day that the British were forced out of Boston which just so happens to coincide with St. Patrick's day.
www.cornholeparty.com is surprisingly SFW.
4: Maybe it hadn't arrived yet in the early 80s when I was there....or maybe I was just that far out of it....
5: More or less the same fate befell Wäldchestag, an unofficial holiday observed uniquely in Frankfurt. The festivities consisted in their entirety of knocking off work at noon, getting drunk, and traipsing through the city forest.
Can't find an mp3 or youtube. Listen to it if you can. It rocks.
(Which is more than his label did when they mistitled it out of sheer ignorance.)
I love evacuation day.
I didn't think heebie was old enough to be in college in 1095.
to have been in college, that is. Wolfson.
11: I guess that explains it. North Campus was an entirely different civilization with distinct customs.
18: Yay! I celebrated a week early, apparently, but it's a great idea.
19: COME OUT WITH YOUR PANTS DOWN!
I celebrated a week early, apparently
How can you tell? He never settles on a date.
22: Isn't that the point of CSD? You don't settle on a date.
Chicago did Sweetest Day. The folks I worked with who had never lived anywhere else didn't believe me when I said that I had never heard of it and that it wasn't nationally known. Our bosses gave us candy, though, so that was nice.
There's a big sign on a commercial street near my house advertising a cornhole festival. I sniggered appropriately.
19, 21: "In my country, we have no bungholes!"
21: WHERE IS TP???? I NEED TP FOR MY BUNGHOLE!
28 owned by Flippanter. I have no bunghole.
From the Wikipedia:
His apparent mission in life is to find "TP (toilet paper) for my bunghole", as "My people are without bungholes", or, in an obvious contradiction, that "My people have but one bunghole." This apparent contradiction is typical of the nonsense he frequently spouts: at other times he claims he himself is a bunghole, that he has no bunghole, that he has a portfolio in his bunghole, that his bunghole will eat now, that he is a gringo, or calls upon "the Almighty Bunghole" (either referring to himself or his supposed god), or that he is the envoy or guardian of the Almighty Bunghole.
I never heard of Sweetest Day in my 4 years at Oberlin, though of course we weren't in school in late June. From heebie's title, I thought that Sweetest Day was the Michigan version of Juneteenth which made extremely little sense.
I've never heard of anyone getting Juneteenth off, though it would be great, politically, historically, and culturally speaking. Perhaps I'll start lobbying to swap it for Columbus Day. Not a big Italian American population in Texas to lobby against it. Plus, Columbus didn't "discover" Texas, so who cares about him anyway?
I think I first heard of Sweetest Day when I saw cards for sale in the Walgreens in Hyde Park. I'm not aware of anyone there celebrating it, though. (Do the Obamas celebrate Sweetest Day? The American people deserve to know!)
Also, Bunker Hill Day? Evacuation Day? You New Englanders are so quaint with your whole "we crushed the British empire" thing.
IRL (as opposed to in Texas life), my NJ childhood was filled with Revolutionary War references -- visits to the Monmouth battlefield, my sister's wedding reception at the Molly Pitcher Inn, a house across the street from my junior high where Washington supposedly slept.
12: I can't listen to it, alas, or to any of the other fantastically titled songs on that page, such as "(You Dyed Your Hair) Chartreuse."
33: It's only Suffolk county government workers, i.e. city workers in Boston. Evacuation Day is just an excuse to get St. Patrick's Day off.
my sister's wedding reception at the Molly Pitcher Inn,
Haha, my pop worked there when I was born. How 'bout the weather vane on top of the old Episcopal church in Shrewsbury (at like Sycamore?) with a musket ball hole in it or the Covenhoven House? We did things like card flax and make apple butter there.
Apple butter is yummy.
Is this Everybody is Actually Working day at unfogged.
Just as the slavocracy, which once seemed so powerful, was crushed by the organizing efforts of people who loved freedom, so too can capitalism be crushed if we will but stand together to oppose it.
I never heard of Sweetest Day in my 4 years at Oberlin, though of course we weren't in school in late June.
FOOL! Shows how much you know! Sweetest day isn't even in June! It's in something-fall-toberish.
I've never heard of anyone getting Juneteenth off, though it would be great, politically, historically, and culturally speaking.
Given all the dumb holidays that people observe in this country--I'm looking at you Confederate Memorial Day--it is a damn shame that a day observing the abolition of slavery isn't celebrated more widely. I'm pretty sure I'd never heard of Juneteenth before college history classes. And besides, there aren't enough holidays during the summer.
I suppose I should take it up with the greeting-card companies.
40: Well I just ASSUMED you brought it up because it was happening around nowish. I guess I was just too busy spending my non-class time trying to bring down apartheid in S. Africa and get the U.S. out of Central America to focus on CANDY.
CANDY s/b THE CANDY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX.
Candy is really fucking delicious, though.
41: Juneteenth doesn't actually mark abolition; it marks when slaves in Galveston got the word that they were free -- two-and-a-half years after abolition. (Oops! Did we forget to mention that? Our bad.)
In some places outside Texas it's become a celebration of abolition in general, but I think it's worth remembering that Texas slaves suffered two-and-a-half years more than they had to. (Not that slaves everywhere else were instantly freed on the effective data of the Emancipation Proclamation, Jan. 1, 1863.)
41: I suspect that abolition isn't celebrated because it would hurt the feelings of the whiny ass titty babies in the former confederacy. Which seems to me like an excellent reason to push for formal recognition. Upsetting neoconfederates is a mitzvah, and if you make one cry you get one of your ancestors out of hell. Fact.
I was delighted to discover (thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates) a wonderful little piece of archival history: the Anderson letter.
If you've never read it, go do so now. You'll be glad you did.
49: That got linked by something like 10% of my Facebook friends recently. It really is fascinating reading.
#45. I remember that. Mostly, I just think it's a shame that the abolition of slavery, a cause for celebration if there ever was one, has never been celebrated more widely in this country. Celebrating "Emancipation Proclamation Day" would accomplish the same thing, I suppose, but observing a traditional holiday appeals to me more.
Upsetting neoconfederates is a mitzvah, and if you make one cry you get one of your ancestors out of hell.
Plus there's this. My own confederate ancestors need all the help they can get.
I often celebrate "Emancipation Proclamation Day" by nursing a hangover.
49. Yeah. It's all good. The postscript is beyond wonderful.
I was delighted to discover (thanks to Ta-Nehisi Coates) a wonderful little piece of archival history: the Anderson letter.
Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely disposed to treat us justly and kindly- - and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty- two years and Mandy twenty years. At $25 a month for me, and $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680.
Damn.
48, 51: I'm on board.
if you make one cry you get one of your ancestors out of hell
My direct ancestors managed to time things so that they were not mass murders of Native Americans nor slaveholders nor Nazis nor Nazi collaborators. On the latter two, I can't vouch for the German and Norwegian cousins.
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Hawaiian Punch got her 2 month vaccinations this morning, and has been screaming every moment she's awake ever since. She really must be feeling awful, because this is a huge departure from her normal temperament.
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58 sounds like animal cruelty to me.
Oops, wrong thread.
I'm hard pressed to choose a single passage in that letter as my favorite, but I did so relish the understated hint of extortion in this line:
I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Col. Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable.
53: That is my favorite part: Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
49: I'd seen it before, and had vaguely assumed it was wonderful but apocryphal. I was delighted to find out that it's got a good provenance going back to 1865.
58: We had the same problem. I have no useful advice. Just expressing sympathy.
Speaking of Ta-nehisi Coates and the Civil War, he linked to a set of Yale lectures by a historian named David Blight on the Civil War a week or so ago. I downloaded them, and listened to the first couple, and was really looking forward to the other twenty-five. And then my laptop seized up to the point where I had to reinstall the operating system, and my iPod died simultaneously, and somehow in transferring files back onto the laptop I lost all the podcasts I had downloaded, and now for some reason subscribing to the podcast through iTunes isn't working -- I could download them one by one, but that's going to be really annoying. Some days I really don't like computers.
The thing I find most striking about the Anderson letter (apart from the hilarious deadpan throughout) is that the former master was such a clueless fuck that he apparently thought there was some possibility of his former slave returning. I've seen similar levels of sociopathic cluelessness by farmers in apartheid South Africa who honestly didn't have the first inkling of how their actions felt from the other end of the sjambok.
62: What kind of provenance? Found in the attic of his former slaveowner's house, or published in the local newspaper? It's a great letter, though.
65: I think believing that your slaves actually didn't mind being slaves is a sign of humanity rather than sociopathy: a self-serving delusion that you're not really doing anything that bad.
It's like drapetomania, a mental illness in slaves whose primary symptom was running away. There really seem to have been a whole lot of clueless fucks, who sincerely believed the slave society was natural and right and that everyone involved, including the slaves, would see that truth if they were just reasonable about it.
66: Published in a Northern newspaper, and there are records of the author's existence as a freed slave with that name. Now, someone might have ghosted it for him, and there's no proof it was actually sent to the master, but it's at least contemporary and there's no real reason to think Anderson didn't write it.
66.2 - Good point. I hadn't thought of it in those terms, but now you point it out it's obvious. Also applies to the "infants don't feel pain" thing in the thread below.
Also awesome "the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson."
When I read the Anderson letter aloud in my mind, it's in the soothing, proud-in-its-humility voice of Morgan Freeman. I blame Driving Miss Daisy.
73: Try Chris Rock instead.
The Dave Chappelle Show (PBUI) might have been able to pull off a nice historical reenactment. (In my mind, I'm casting Charlie Murphy as Anderson.) A more understated follow-up to one of the show's great moments: "I traveled all the way back in time to call you a cracker!"
64: I downloaded those and have listened to some of them. Good stuff, but for some reason the volume is incredibly low - I have to crank my ipod's volume all the way up and even then the sounds is only just audible. I have to listen on my mac, which luckily goes to 11.
Also, if you locate the eye-gouging paper referenced in the second (third, maybe) podcast, I'd love to read it. I'm looking for it, but no luck so far.
Try Chris Rock Snoop Dogg instead.