Satire from Товарищ Х

My Imaginary Friend - The Sweetest Day Fairy

I am a tad late in remembering the Sweetest Day Fairy again this year. That was scheduled to happen, by the Lords of Sweetness one presumes, on the third Saturday in October. Mea maxima culpa. For all you may care, at this late hour, I imagine my friend not as the chubby flying toddler seen on Valentines, but looking rather more like this fellow that I surprised in flagrante delicto at the Cleveland Museum of Art one afternoon. That image derives, at least in part, from my confusion over the eponymous holiday observance that I encountered for the first time when I was transplanted to Cleveland in late adolescence. The very name "Sweetest Day" raised the sort of questions that incomplete comparisons have always teased out of me. "Sweetest Day," you say? Well then-- sweeter than what other day, according to whom, and by what measure of sweetness?

Well you, no doubt, are not so easily sidetracked by such questions, and will have already surmised that they were completely off the mark in this inquiry. The holiday was proposed, in Cleveland as it happens, by several civic minded chaps (merchants all) who, as they said in announcing their first Sweetest Day, "recognized the eternal tendency of men and women to forget the finer, more appealing things." And urged us to. "Regard its observance as a sacred duty-- and a rare opportunity." It was just before this that my friend, through a revelation of sorts, had them title their holiday in his honor rather that relying on their original choice, "Buy Our Cheap Crap and Give It to Someone in the Desperate Hope of Distracting Attention From Your True Character Whilst You Have a Go at Them Day." Those long titles never sell.

Товарищ Х is a political activist and composer who lives in Cleveland, Ohio.