Amber Taylor recently emailed me about her campaign to institute an American National Kissing Day. I was already familiar with her efforts, but I have two concerns.
First, I’m seriously troubled by the fact that I can’t celebrate this holiday as I would like to. Now, many holidays have these sorts of limits—you can’t set off fireworks in the office for July 4th, after all—but a National Kissing Day somehow loses a good deal of its meaning for me if my opportunities to celebrate it are going to be as limited as my opportunities to use fireworks. Indeed, many people don’t use fireworks at all for July 4th, but allow experts to set off their fireworks for them. Heaven knows I love to watch a professional like Charlize Theron show us how kissing is done, but honestly, I’d rather do it badly myself.
On a related note, if one’s going to celebrate National Kissing Day, one has to be highly confident that others know of the existence of the holiday. If you go about with Merry Christmas on your lips, every idiot knows that it’s Christmas and doesn’t think anything about it. If I go about kissing girls I’ve longed for a while to kiss, I have to hope that they, or the police, are familiar with National Kissing Day. True, I do celebrate holidays that nobody else knows about—I just go nuts at Guy Fawkes’ Day (really!)—but those are holidays that are not commemorated by potentially felonious assaults.
Second, are people really that insensate to the pleasures of kissing? I know that our youth are going to hell, but surely they still kiss and enjoy being kissed. Not to tell stories out of school, but when I was a young whippersnapper I once kissed a girl for ten hours straight—just kissing. Am I just square? Maybe I am. I do use words like “square,” for instance. But I kiss my Erin every time I see her. Do I need a holiday?
And that brings to mind another problem. I celebrate my Erin every day—yet I’m still socially required to get her something special for Valentine’s Day. This is, as many people have noted, a scheme by Hallmark to rob me of my hard-earned money. How are we to be sure that National Kissing Day isn’t just a clever scheme by Amber Taylor (or maybe her sister, Ann) to sell us something? She may not have mentioned it yet, but perhaps she’s just laying the ground work.... Wait, I’ve got it! She’s bought stock in the Hershey Corporation, and in five years, once her little Kissing Day has been drilled into the minds of women everywhere, all us guys will be forced to fork over the money to buy Hershey’s Kisses for our sweethearts.
Must be an idea she came up with at The Meadows.
Update: Amber Taylor answers here.
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