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Do they start Easter sales in December?

And you don’t get Christmas whoopie because Oliver Cromwell banned big Christmas foofrah so the “colonists” escaping his righteous rule made a bigger deal of it here in the US in the south while the puritans in the North, who sought religious freedom, made sure others weren’t free to enjoy it.
Banned in Boston in fact, from 1659 to 1681.
And bitched and moaned about separation of church and state when the Federal government made it a holiday.

Alabama is credited with first making it a public holiday in 1836.
Then we got all the Krauts in the 1850’s fleeing the arguments between Prussia and the German Confederation and they were all carrying Christmas trees and signing the wrong words to “Maryland, my Maryland”, and not settling in New England, though they did leave all their fir trees there as they moved west and dragged Christmas along with them.

Then U.S. Grant & Congress made it a national holiday in 1870, to try and reunite the country after the War of Northern Aggression ended.

My source says Oklahoma was the last state to make it a public holiday in 1907, so don’t go celebrating it in Hawaii or Alaska, which weren’t states in 1907.
Hawaii has been officially celebrating it since 1862 and it got grandfathered in in 1959.
Alaska seems to have just glommed onto the Federal holiday and all you can find out is they own it by virtue of the North Pole, snow, and lots of fir trees.

So next time they ask remind them that though we might have once been crown colonies we let scads of fuzzy furriners in from everywhere else that celebrated Christmas a little more than they do in Merry Olde.

Have a nice Easter, S. Weasel and the gang 🙂

December 25 is the federal holiday—not Christmas (wink wink). Federal employees may use the day however they choose. Easter—falling on a Sunday is a normal day off (for most federal employees) but Good Friday is NOT a federal holiday.

My former employer eliminated Good Friday and Columbus Day holidays from the official holiday calendar during the 90’s. Coincidentally, immediately after the annoucement upper management purchased 2 Lexuses (Lexii?) for the CEO and CFO. What a morale booster!

I got it good. This weekend I have all the merchandising and sales and all the candy and stuff. Then I get serious on the historical Good Friday and Easter Sunday, May 3 and 5 this year.

That’s because the splitters made their own calendar just to be difficult, and we Orthodox Christians didn’t mess with what worked just fine all those centuries. Still does work, too.

Please don’t take me seriously. I’m all in favor of these Commemorations and Celebrations and don’t get bothered much by pesky details. (But, ahem, we DO have continuous apostolic succession all the way back to the originals. So there’s that.)

Easter is a bit traumatic for me… Back in the late 80’s my company opened a 1.8 million sq ft distribution center, with a ‘state of the art’ inventory control system that had never been tried anywhere before, a 14 mile conveyer belt system…..AND just for style points, 1500 new employees (We did have a cadre of 20 experienced management of whom I was one, so let’s say 19, but anyhow).

So the machinery was buggy, the software was quirky, and the employees had zero experience. Oh and the Chief Management Official had an ego the size of Detroit. After 30 days of testing he decided, “We got this shit!” and had $120 million worth of inventory brought in in 45 days; trucks and rail cars delivering day and night.
Well, we didn’t. The inventory was supposed to be scanned in upon delivery (hot stuff in those days) and the computer would tell us where to store it. The clever thing about this inventory control system was that it was designed to make most efficient use of space…. why have a space dedicated to storing shoes when you ain’t got none? Put, uh, baseballs or bras or whatever there because the software will remember where everything is.

Except it didn’t. Partly because it was ,uhm, immature software, partly because our minimum wage people didn’t understand the scanners and data entry, and partly because the forklift operators just put stuff wherever and the system let them without consequences. So… after 2 months we had $120 million worth of merchandise in a giant building and we didn’t know where any of it was except that it was somewhere in that building. We the management, were working 12 hour days, 7 days a week, and Mr Ego had to give in and call for reinforcements from HQ. Oh, and during all this, we were unable to supply the 100 or so retail stores we were supposed to support. We got a nickname from them, DDDC: Don’t Deliver; Don’t Care. Ouch!

After we had been open six months, things were worse than ever. Our Receiving Floor (some 50,000 sq ft) was jammed because every time we tried to put something where the computer instructed us, there was something already there… but where was that actually supposed to be? Who knew.

This brings us, finally to Easter. One morning, about a week before Easter Katey ‘X’ came into my office crying. Now, Katey was pretty tough and a veteran at the Distribution game, and we were pretty battle hardened by this point…but she was crying.

“What’s wrong, Katey?”

“I was just out on the Receiving floor and I smelled something and at first I couldn’t figure out what it was…”

“And what was it?”

“Chocolate. We have so much Easter chocolate you can smell it through the cases. We haven’t shipped ANY chocolate to 100 stores….and it is a week before Easter.”

We eventually wrote off about $100K worth of Easter chocolates. What can you do with it? NOBODY wants Chocolate Easter Bunnies or Chocolate eggs or ANYTHING in Easter packaging in May…or June…or…until next year.

To this day the sight of a chocolate Easter Bunny turns my stomach.

Postscript: I personally didn’t get fired, nor did Katey, but a lot of management did. It took about two years to get everything sorted out at DDDC….and thank The Lord Jesus, I was long gone from there by then, recovering.

Anyhow, you can keep yer damn Easter candy, and yes that includes Cadbury Eggs.