Best and Worst Festive Day / Public Holidays

The best three public holidays / festive days of the year, in my opinion, are:

1. Halloween. I LOVE Halloween. I love the dressing up and the trick or treating and the way the kids get so into it. I love the "safe spookiness" and the decorations and the candy and the community spirit and the fun. It never feels stressy for me. I look forward to it every year.

2. Grand Final Eve. I am not in the slightest a football person and I detest Grand Final boozers and loud GF parties, BUT the advent of this new public holiday has given us the lovely gift of a long weekend at the end of the spring school holidays were we can go away as a family. In the first year of the holiday, we went to Bendigo and visited with friends; in year 2, we went to Ballarat and had Sovereign Hill largely to ourselves; and this year, we incorporated it into our Sydney trip. All good stuff!

3. Easter. There is something super fun about Easter when you have kids, and Easter lamb is the business. This is another holiday that never feels stressful for me.

The worst three public holidays / festive days of the year, for me, are:

1. New Year's Eve. NO CONTEST this is hands-down the pits. The bass thump of loud parties all around all night, people doing stupid shit in stupid ways, the animals getting agitated and terrified ... There is nothing I like about it. (Well, I don't mind fireworks - the legal ones anyway, the illegal ones make me super anxious about fire risks).

2. Australia Day. This one is especially yuk if located next to a weekend, but either the night before or the night of, it also spawns too many loud parties. I am also extremely uncomfortable with what it "celebrates".

3. Melbourne Cup Day. This is not because of noise exactly, but because I am increasingly disturbed and a bit disgusted at both the animal cruelty involved and the excess manifested by racegoers. Spring racing carnival is my least favourite time to be catching trains, especially near the end of a race day - I've had shoes vomited on not once but twice in my life, and both times were by pissed racegoers.

The other holidays / festive days I would bracket together as "mostly enjoyable, occasionally a bit stressful or else not remarkable": Christmas Day (which is usually good but can be a bit pressured); Boxing Day, Queens Birthday, Labour Day and ANZAC Day (all of which are fine, good even, but not especially notable, particularly now I am a freelancer and I don't get paid public holidays so I tend to treat them like any other day really).

So there you go. My Holiday Primer!

(This is post #23 in NaBloPoMo. 23 down, 7 to go!)