Friday! No costumes, no candy, no jack-o-lanterns, just the slow, cool haul of November. I like this month, mostly because when you go to flip the calendar you take a look at the days ahead and there's always a couple of days off two-thirds of the way through, a breather before the parade of lights and plastic that is December. I always feel optimistic about November, "I can make it through this month, easy!" It's December that's a killer. Cold and dark, with that Uber-Holiday way down at the end, and you only get a single day off for it. How come not two? Or at least three, for Christmas? And this year, it lands on a Tuesday! Oy.

X-mes.

(Still cracks me up.) But Thanksgiving is nice -no buying gifts, no obligations, just get together and eat. Seems to me we should have Thanksgiving after Christmas, so everyone on the receiving end would have something to be thankful for. For that matter, all these holidays need some re-structuring: Christmas should always be on a Sunday. Like Easter. And speaking of Easter, let's just call it on the first Sunday in April and be done with it, dig? 4th of July, Labor Day, and Memorial Day stay -they work good where they are, though it'd be helpful to have the 4th on a Saturday every year because even though the fireworks always start at dark, you're still stuck in traffic on the way home worrying about work the next day. Veterans Day is always lost in the shuffle and it makes me sad. Can we replace Labor Day with Veterans Day -as Labor Day is a communist holiday anyway- and then hold Election Day on Veterans Day, because that's what they died for! Dennis Prager says we should abolish Presidents Day. I say we abolish Fat Tuesday until Ash Wednesday gets due recognition. St. Patrick's day stays, though it should be on a Friday, but no Oktoberfest? It's never on the calendar. We all know how I feel about Columbus Day, and don't even get me started on Administrative Professionals Day, Grandparents Day, All Canadian & British Holidays, and Earth Day -which is, duh, every day, don't we already have Arbor Day?

And then there's the issue of Daylight Savings Time. Lord, can we just leave the clock alone like the sane people in Arizona and Hawaii do? And, look. the date to change the clocks is wrong on my printed calendar here! Okay, DST is a complex issue -so complex, in fact, that more energy is wasted dealing with it than is saved instituting it. Half the clocks in my house changed themselves a couple of weeks ago, and I'm just waiting until this weekend for it all to catch up. Among the problem timepieces was Mrs. Ditchman's PC, incidentally. I think the thing was built in 1985, so it figures. (This old Mac is okay, for now.) The time changed automatically a few weeks ago on the house alarm system, too, so all burglars are kindly asked to rob the house an hour earlier so that we can get the Time of Crime correct on the police report.

But we'll survive the "long, dark tunnel of winter". The dark tunnel actually lets up on the first day of winter, when the days start getting longer -also confusing. So we just deal. When you lean back in your desk chair to think about it, there's an awful lot in life that you have no control over and you j u s t l e t g o .

Like Boxing Day. What I want is an American Calendar -Is this too much to ask? I want Ronald Reagan's and Teddy Roosevelt's birthdays on it. And Henry Ford's and Thomas Edison's. And I want to know when all the states were admitted into the union. I want all the federally recognized holidays and all the military remembrance days and I don't mind the Jewish holidays but I've no need for Victoria Day or Mexico's Independence Day or St. Jean Baptiste Day (Quebec), those country's can have their own calendars. And from now on September 11th should be in bold print.

There's a lot of people out there who get all in a lather about the Mayan Calendar being so superior, even though it did nothing to save their race. And then people are mad about the days of the months being off, and the mixture of Roman gods and Norse gods and emperors and Jesus birth year -well, you can have all that, I just want a list of American Days. Don't clutter up the squares with foreign stuff that doesn't pertain to me because I need the space to write: "Sparklett's Delivery" and "Street Cleaner" and "Aquarium Water Change" and "Dinner at your Mom's".

By the way, the Mayan Calendar expires December 21st, 2012, which some say is when the aliens return to whisk us all away to the interstellar zoo, seeing as we're obviously just fermenting here in a big galactic lab. Don't forget to set your clocks back for that one, or you'll miss the ship! (That is, unless we already have, which explains where the Mayans went in the first place.)

And get your hoe ready!