Company Policy
We all enjoy nosing around each other's houses, so lets make a day of it.
By Philip Gulley
America has a lot of challenges facing it these days, but our biggest problem is our lack of good holidays. Christmas has grown too expensive, the Fourth of July too noisy, Halloween too menacing, Thanksgiving too frantic, and Easter involves ham, which is to food what George W. Bush was to eloquence. The other holidays—Presidents’ Day, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Veterans’ Day—honor dead people whom we should have lauded while they were still alive to enjoy it.
The best holidays are those that satisfy a deep yearning. National Toasted Marshmallow Day, for example, is August 30, but it has never caught on. What is needed is a holiday that captures our imaginations, scratches us where we itch, contributes to peace and understanding, and can be easily practiced by all races and classes.
For the past several years, I have been searching for just such a holiday, and I believe I have happened upon the perfect one. Lightning struck as my wife and I were driving past a charming home in our town. My wife said, “I would love to see inside that house.”
“I would, too,” I said. “I’ve heard it’s really nice.”
We drove for a few more blocks in a companionable silence. Then I said, “Wouldn’t it be neat to have one day when everyone took off work and opened their homes? You could go in any home to see it.”
“I don’t think women would like that holiday,” my wife said. “We would have to clean the house.”
My wife’s assumption that women are the housecleaners struck me as sexist, but since it’s true in our house I decided not to challenge it.
“Then what if someone came to your house and they didn’t leave?” she said. “What if they stayed all day long and yakked and yakked and yakked?”
“One of the rules of the holiday would be that you couldn’t stay in any house for longer than 20 minutes,” I said. “Then you would have to leave and go see another house.”
She thought for a moment. “How could you go see other homes if people were in your home? Otherwise your home would be wide open.”
“We would have another rule that no one could steal anything from someone else’s house.”
I am a wild optimist, sometimes to the point of insanity.
“What would we call this holiday?” she asked.
“How about Meet-Your-Neighbor Day?”
“It’s friendly. It’s to the point. I like it,” she said.
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