If you’re a mall shopper, you’ve probably noticed by now that holiday cheer is beginning to creep up all around us. From discount to deluxe, a festival atmosphere will dominate most of your retail shopping experience from now until well after New Year’s. Unfortunately, the frenetic glam-rock of the retail season often serves to drown out a much quieter late-year sentiment: winter is a season to remember.
This is not the Gap’s Holiday Season 2002 brainwashing one-liner. (Remember last year’s “Give your Gift”?) This is not a call for more post-Sept. 11 prime time network star-studded extravaganzas. I won’t be writing about a manger.
Disclaimers aside, there are several annual events of remembrance, remorse and reflection that go completely unnoticed due to the momentum of the traditional holiday season. October, for example, contains two dates of some significance to the gay community: National Coming Out Day, Oct. 11, and Oct. 12 this year marked the fourth anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s death. Ironically enough, World Mental Health Day falls just before these, on Oct. 10.
As October fades out and November blows in, Midwesterners often forget that while they’re carving pumpkins, a sizable portion of those with whom they share the continent are celebrating El DÃa de los Muertos, Mexico’s Day of the Dead, generally celebrated on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2. Though considered a joyful family holiday, Mexican American communities in the United States have used El DÃa de los Muertos as a means of community building and making political statements, building traditional altars to the memory of victims of drunken drivers, gang warfare or AIDS.
November is also the month in which The Transgender Day of Remembrance memorializes victims of violence against the transgender, transsexual, crossdresser and otherwise gender-variant communities on Nov. 20.
Gender.org reports that 18 people have died in the last year as a result of trans-directed violence. If this doesn’t sound like a lot, consider this: The FBI’s latest annual Uniform Crime Report on Hate and Bias Crime lists only 18 hate-crime related deaths in the United States in the year 2000 – in most states’ jurisdictions, gender is not covered by hate crimes laws. If it is, it is rarely applied to bias-motivated homocides of “trans-people.”
Nov. 20 also happens to be Universal Children’s Day and African Industrialization Day.
In case this stresses you out, Nov. 21 is World Television Day. Nov. 25 commemorates the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women; its Canadian counterpart, the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women is celebrated on Dec. 6. The United States has no correlating holiday.
World AIDS Day is on December first, so make sure your prophylactic fits and your stigma doesn’t. The International Day of DisAbled Persons follows on the third, though IDdAP-HQ has been inexplicably moved to some mysterious location in the Asian Pacific, for reasons of international politics that this columnist has yet to grasp.
To top off your counterculture holiday season, take some time on Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, to consider these words from United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights” and that “they are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” – and that this applies to idiots in mall traffic too.
It may be that matters of idealism and matters of commercialism can never be truly reconciled. “Recognition of the inherent dignity of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”? Try telling that to a gassy mall Santa.
Bryan Dale Miller is a junior in social work and can be reached for comment at [email protected].
