Harbor Day

The New Yorker Culture Desk runs a weekly online Twitter contest each Friday. If you have never participated, I highly recommend it. Past challenges have included:

• Recap Star Wars in one tweet 
• Suggest inappropriate products to market based on a literary work 
• Propose a psychological, economic, or political effect - name it, bring it to life via Twitter

All you need to participate is 1) the ability to be a tad strange and 2) being capable of appending the hash tag #tnyquestion to your tweet.

Just the kind of low bar that speaks to me.

The most recent contest was to invent a new national holiday.  In a highly unexpected, nearly inconceivable stroke of luck, my offering was declared the winner.  My suggested holiday was:

Harbor Day - Dedicated to holding on to bad feelings about others and passive-aggressively hinting at them. See Thanksgiving.


Through an editorial fiat, which has my full support, The New Yorker has established December 1 as the official date for Harbor Day.  This was an excellent choice blending the forces of post-Thanksgiving family dinner trauma with the increasing intensity of the shopping water torture of Christmas gift list items bouncing off your forehead.

And, of course, consistent with my personal brand, I didn't think this through.  I did create Google+ (for the 6 of us active there) and Facebook invites for Harbor Day. Please share these invites with your friends.  I'd like 1 million people to accept these invites across platforms (hear me 999,994 Facebook people?!?!?).

But, we can't enjoy our first Harbor Day without the accompanying traditions and rituals. Which, well... are kind of TBD.

I thought I would jump start the thinking here.  My hope is this prompts others far more clever than I to offer improvements for me to steal incorporate in the Harbor Day canon.  We are off to a good start with Susana Martins, the embodiment of Harbor Day, accepting a co-chair role in planning and Lori Chase penning the perfect e-vite text for our holiday:

We can provide food and drinks, but if you feel like bringing something for once, we'd like it.

Note: Harbor Day was basically in a virtual tie with Lori's more intellectually nuanced "Take a Friend or Relative to Therapy Day (“Getting someone to see a shrink by any other name would smell just as sweet”).  


Some thought starters for Harbor Day rituals:

1. I am pretty sure this is a card-based holiday.  Nothing says "I am absolutely limiting my financial and intellectual investment in you" like a card does.  E-cards - even better
2. Traditional foods are likely lemon or tart grape based
3. Drinking would seem to be a must
4. Trying to figure out how to work "...and then I send $1 to Kelly" into this.  Stay tuned

Would love to hear other ideas... via blog comment, email, tweet, Facebook... whatever.

Not exactly sure we want to roll 100% this way, but the following concept from Tim Thomas was so good I had to share:

I remember celebrating Harbor Day as a child with the grandparents. We ate roast turkey and dressed in costumes begging neighbors for eggs. Then when the homeless guy came out from our crawlspace and saw his shadow the fireworks began. God bless us everyone!

Much more to come (sorry!) and while I still have never gotten over my recap of Star Wars ("Never underestimate the importance of exhaust port protection") being ignored in an earlier contest - I'll address that more December 1.