Holidays Neverending

With Christmas behind us and New Year ahead of us, I'm pretty much holidayed out. Still, it seems to me that we're missing a few obvious holidays -- days that would celebrate something that deserves it, or days that might just, against all the odds, give us a lift.

First, some days I'd like to transplant from other cultures.

Japan celebrates Girls' Day and Boys' Day, and I think both are worthy of consideration. Any day that celebrates kids is okay by me. And I especially like doing it one sex at a time, so both sexes get equal applause without everyone getting all twittery about how boys get more attention than girls or vice-versa. It would be nice to honor boys and girls in the spring, say in April and May, since that's the most optimistic season.

Thailand and many other Asian countries observe Buddha's birthday, and we should make make room for it on our calendars as well. Actually Visakha Bucha, as it's called in Thailand (Hanamatsuri in Japan), celebrates both the birth and the enlightenment of the founder of the only major world religion that has not killed millions of people in the name of God. The celebration is marked by kindness to others, especially the less fortunate. Like Christmas, it's an arbitrary date, chosen much later than the event it commemorates. Unlike Christmas, it's a floating festival, since the date is determined by the lunar calendar, but it's usually in early May.

That's a lot of spring holidays, so let's turn to summer and the first of my new holidays, Global Golf Pants Day. No article of clothing is sillier than golf pants, so why not give them a day of their own? Millions of people out on the streets, wearing the worst golf pants they can find. A parallel YouTube golf pants film festival. A commemorative Victoria's Secret Golf Pants catalog. Awards in appropriate categories, such as Most Deafening Color Combination and Most Perilous Plaid.

In fall, at the beginning of the television season, it would be appropriate to remember the fallen prime-time warriors of yesteryear on Canceled Series Memorial Day. People could dress as the characters in their favorite extinct programs; they could rehearse short scenes with friends and, for a small donation to a good cause like the World Federation for the Furtherance of Laughter, they could get little laugh track boxes -- just a speaker with three buttons for guffaw, chortle, and anticipatory giggle. Think of it -- for one day a year, New York could actually be like "Seinfeld" and Los Angeles could go back to the palmy days of "77 Sunset Strip," the worst show nobody remembers.

And for winter, at least in colder parts of the world, we could do Anime Snowplay Day, on which children build frosty tributes to their favorite animated character. Some Japanese kids have gotten a jump on us with this snowy "Totoro" from Miyazaki's animated masterpiece of the same name. I'd personally love to turn on the news one night and discover animated figures glistening all over the landscape.

Any other suggestions? My only criterion is that it should make us feel better, even if only for a day.