Editorial: Break with tradition

A pox on public holidays! Roads are clogged with unhappy campers. Police vehicles, festooned with alarming lighting displays, are everywhere spreading fear among intrepid motorists, and ever-grislier roadside traffic billboards threaten certain doom. It's a wonder anyone survives.

Added to that, liquor outlets are closed just when you forgot you couldn't grab a bottle on the way as usual.

For stay-at-homes and those still at work, normal services are off.

Media paint saccharine pictures of illusory holidays for all, while, in reality, taxpayers with proper jobs (who get paid days off) are quite possibly outnumbered by contractors and the self-employed who receive no holiday (or sick) pay, and the unemployed - all taxpayers - for whom public holidays mean business as usual.

Why? Mostly for misplaced, unseasonal, colonial reasons focused on illusory supernatural beings comparatively few subscribe to.

For example Easter (cf oestrus) is a spring celebration transplanted from a Northern Hemisphere church calendar grafted on to an earlier pagan festival. The symbolism is all eggs, new life, growth, resurrection. It makes no sense whatsoever to hold it in autumn, when everything is dying off.

Christmas likewise - think winter food, fake snow, exotic trees and furry costumes, in sweltering heat. Even Guy Fawkes - the perfect opportunity to burn bonfires of autumn leaves and prunings - is held instead in spring. Go figure.

By all means let us salute the seasons in fine style. What with earthquakes, floods, tsunami and tornadoes to contend with, just surviving elemental forces on our volatile little blue planet is worth celebrating alone.

But why not do it at appropriate times, without religious claptrap, interruptions to essential services or perilous mass exoduses?

Inconvenience, seasonal incongruity, the road toll, the hypocritical charade, and the false gods associated with public holidays are bad enough, but the worst aspect, by far, is lack of newspapers.

It's enough to make a person spit. (Not that I can. I've tried. Apparently trajectory is all in the way you roll your tongue.)

I'm thinking about starting a national newspaper published exclusively on public holidays, for everybody ( I know I am not alone) who cannot bear working days without fresh puzzles over lunch.

Distribution could be tricky but the limited number of annual deadlines, with oodles of time between to stockpile content, appeal.

It could be packed with humour, stories about the health benefits of gardening, chocolate, recreational drug, music and alcohol consumption, puzzles, a range of horoscopes, a selection of the best news/arts/nature images from around the world and even poetry. Needless to say, there would be no crime, safety, sports or food stories; all of which receive far too much coverage every other day of the year.

Good ideas and big prizes are always cheerful. Turning IRD into a lottery provider, with tickets in blockbuster cash prizes (winners announced on public holidays in my new paper) for every $100 of tax paid would be great.

Judging by existing lottery sales, anyone would be happier to cough up their taxes if prizes were in the offing. And just think, all of those heroic taxpayers who never get holidays would be in with a chance to win the means to take some time out.