Today is also the Vietnamese New Year. Calendars are very political, I was telling my dear mother when I spoke to her today to wish her a happy Chinese New Year of the Rat.
The Japanese have a maddening calendar whose hours changed according to the time of year which they used for 28 years between 1844 to 1872 before Westernising and celebrating their new year on 1 January like normal people. This reminded me of how the French Revolutionaries drove themselves mad after changing their calendar and measurements. The British are still subject to the metric system. What do people think of my proposal of returning to the imperial system as an assertion of national sovereignty and having our money in pounds, shilling and pence again after rebasing our currency after our Secular Koranist Islamic Revolution? It would make children learn their time tables again, wouldn't it?
For some reason, I am not so keen on adopting the Islamic calendar and am toying with the idea of the Jewish one. (That would mean that this year is in fact 5780 rather than merely 2020.) If we all started celebrating Jewish festivals with Jews, there would be less antisemitism, I am sure. Easter and Christmas are just silly because even Christians don't believe Christ was born on 25 December or that Christ rose from the dead on Easter Bank Holiday Sunday.
Instead of Christians suffering from cultural appropriation, I propose that Jews should now be the new victims of cultural appropriation - for the excellent cause of preventing antisemitism - while we live in a one party theocracy governed by the principles of Secular Koranism.
Think of all the money to be made from Hanukkah candle holders, temporary huts we can get from Homebase/B&Q as well as palm leaves and etrog from Sainsbury's and Tesco!
Of course, the rest of us don't have to keep kosher or halal, but it would help us get along a bit better if we celebrated the same festivals. Islam only gives us a month of fasting on Ramadan and that's it, so there is nothing really to culturally appropriate from Muslims.
I have always thought that Jewish festivals are so much more fun than Christian ones, especially the thing they do with football rattles on Purim!
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