Blah Week coming down

“Golden Week” is tied to Asian holiday and tourism action, so it needs no introduction to Saipan Tribune readers.

So allow me to present another week, one that doesn’t carry the sparkle of golden notions: Blah Week. Well, that’s what I call it, anyway.

What is Blah Week? It’s the awkward span between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, both of which are defined as federal holidays. So the days themselves enjoy official status, but they bookmark an interval that is lost territory.

I grew up with this calendar so I didn’t used to give it much thought. It is, of course, hardly universal, and some nations have weeklong holidays that are opportune times for families to get together. With this in mind, someone asked me what time of year Americans observe this rite.

That’s a good question. I don’t have a good answer. We have the occasional three-day weekend, but nothing nearly on the order of a weeklong holiday. I mean “holiday” in the American sense of an officially fixed day on everyone’s calendar as opposed to what Americans call “vacation.”

As for vacation time, it’s a floating target and not the same as a statutory holiday. Vacation doesn’t always have a lot of juice. When I worked in the corporate world I recall that two weeks of annual vacation were the standard benefit for many rank-and-file jobs, but not even this assured time off during any given period, since the peak vacation times often went to the more senior employees.

I’ve seen more than a few cases where the best a family can do is have a two-day stay together, with travel taking up a day on the front end plus another day on the back end, for a total of a four-day span.

Fortunately, many families fare better than that, especially if geographic proximity, job seniority, or scheduling flexibility put some aces in the deck.

Me, I’ve never gotten wound up about this stuff. I’m a sucker for the holidays, but I’ve marked many a Christmas sitting in my beach chair with my toes stuck in the sand. That’s just fine with me. I don’t feel compelled to travel for leisure if it’s going to cause me the slightest amount of aggravation or exertion. I’ll save that stress for working situations. Outside of that, no thanks.

Still, no matter how laidback I am about things, I have to recognize that Blah Week can make some types of work difficult. After all, much of the working world is caught straddling an interruption of the holidays, and the mindset and circumstances don’t promote peak efficiency.

This applies mostly to office work, I’ll note. There are, by contrast, many industries that are used to working around-the-clock and around-the-calendar, so they pretty much get to escape the blahs.

If nothing else, Blah Week provides a quiet time to gently tally the year’s events. Easing out of a year seems sensible to me, unless you’re so busy that you can’t be bothered with such notions, which is even better.

Meanwhile, if you ever want to really stew in a case of the blahs, then listen to Johnny Cash sing Sunday Morning Coming Down. That mournful song captures the blahs so well that it’ll drop a fuzzy ball of them down your shirt when you hear it.

So much for Blah Week. It’s not really bad, it’s more like awkward, being neither a holiday, nor a normal working week, and, well, whatever it is, or isn’t, another one is coming down.