The holidaze of our lives

The mother of all celebration days should be extended to specials available the whole year round

- Christian Stephen

The past few months have been a disruptive time in the workplace.

It is a time of year with clusters of public holidays when calculating employees, who are supremely confident of their value to the company, take leave to maximise the number of days they get off.

Eagle-eyed HR will have taken note of the names of these foolishly misguided individuals.

The rest of us, more mindful of how precarious our positions are in the job market (“SA’s unemployment rate edges up to 32.9%”), will have taken on the extra hours and the added stress.

The problem with these months is that there are just too many “days”: religious days, public holidays and those “days” that started out with good intentions but have turned into orgies of crass commercialism.

Prime among these is Mother’s Day, which was originally conceived as a celebration honouring motherhood. The day has different versions and dates all over the world but is predominantly rooted in religion.

Unfortunately, it was rapidly taken over by the cult of commerce. So much so that, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Anna Jarvis, who initiated the American version in the early 20th century, “regretted this commercialism and expressed that this was never her intention”.

It is not that mothers don’t deserve all the appreciation they can get. It is just that I resent being shown how to do this by mall business owners.

My dear mum is long gone, so I can only speak as a dad, but surely we have advanced far enough on the road to gender parity that this appreciation for mothers is shown throughout the year?