National Nothing Day

These Yanks – what will they think of next? A special day for doing nothing when the rest of the world strives to achieve that every day!

Seemingly created by newspaperman Harold Pullman Coffin in 1973, the idea was to provide Americans with one national day when they can just sit without celebrating, observing, or honoring anything. Why can’t they just go on strike like the Brits?

This picture is by Edward Hopper, and was chosen for its appropriateness by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art as part of the “1001 Days and Nights of American Art” theme.

And if you were to scurry over to their site today and follow the eponymous link you will find – nothing! And quite right too, when you consider what today is.

Jan 15th Iroquois Dog Feast

(…or, why dogs roll in anything they can find…)

The Indians scattered along the river, from five to eight miles apart, as far as the falls; they hauled their canoes above high water mark and covered them with bark, and went from three to five miles back into the woods. In the spring after sugar making, they all packed their skins, sugar, bear’s oil, honey and jerked venison, to their crafts. They frequently had to make more canoes, either of wood or bark, as the increase of their furs, &c., required. They would descend the river in April, from sixty to eighty families, and encamp on the west side of the river for eight or ten days, take a drunken scrape an have a feast. I was invited to partake of a white dog. They singed part of the hair off and chopped him up, and made a large kettle of soup. They erected a scaffold, and offered a large wooden bowlful, placed on the scaffold, to “Manitou,” and then they presented me with one fore-paw well boiled, and plenty of soup, the hair still between the toes. I excused ; they said, “a good soldier could eat such.” They said “God was a good man and would not hurt anybody.” They, in offering the sacrifice to Manitou, prayed to him for their safety over the lake, and that they might have a good crop of corn, &c.

YOURS, &c.,

Gilman Bryant

 

LETTER OF GILMAN BRYANT.

MOUNT VERNON, OHIO, JUNE 1ST, 1857.

The Early History of Cleveland
by Charles Whittlesey
1867