Deer Hunter’s Holiday
Marquette, MI – Probably the last great undeclared state holiday is the opening day of deer season. November 15th certainly creates a much bigger hoopla than many other holidays.
While many public schools and businesses close for Opening Day, whoever calls in sick so as not to miss a Presidents’ Day celebration? Who has ever towed a snowmobile 500 miles in a blinding blizzard to be somewhere special for Martin Luther King Day? What other holiday causes grown men to feel like little kids again? What other holiday causes grown men to act like little kids again?
Opening Day certainly ranks way up there among the biggies for the Chamber Of Commerce as well. Perhaps the Fourth Of July sells more gas, but I’ll bet November 15 clobbers ’em all for cigarettes and beer. Throw in bullets, batteries, booze, and miscellaneous nimrod paraphernalia and you have a retail bonanza. And motels are a lot more costly than campgrounds.
In order to become an official holiday, a day should promote and inspire traditional values that reflect our culture and heritage. What day could be more qualified than November 15? Hunting and gathering skills are as old as Mastodon droppings and our society has long valued shooting critters for recreation. It’s a good panacea for violent urges during times of little war. And we’d have no heritage at all without the millions of people venison has kept from starving throughout history.
What backwoods Michigan boy doesn’t have colorful memories of deer camp and their first Opening Day? I recall with fond warmth the old Willys Jeep we rode most of the way into deer camp, the deep snow, the jacking, pushing, winching, cursing, soaking, aching, frozen walk to the warm shack in the middle of nowhere. We were too miserable to be bored. No cup of coffee ever tasted as good before or since. No bed was ever so soft as the stained, chicken-feathered, lumpy outrage to which I was assigned. Sleeping bags were invented because of that mattress.
It was a time for boys to be inaugurated into the Club Of Man, a poignant coming of age, a period of healthy father and son bonding in the lap of Mother Nature. A bit of the living frontier, when men gathered to behave other than polite society demands; to drink, belch, smoke, break wind, chew, spit, gamble, and curse like Old Tombstone, complete with guns. What could feel more manly?
Every holiday has its cuisine, largely dependent upon the season. Thanksgiving Day’s turkey gives way to the Christmas goose as autumn becomes winter. When the snows melt, we serve an Easter ham before the summer burger and brat barbecues of Memorial and Independence Days. Opening Day has a cuisine all its own as well.
The successful deer camps will dine on succulent onion-and-butter-fried venison tenderloins. Other rustic camps will contend with multi-meat stew and various fried sausages. Some will enjoy frozen pizzas or pickled eggs out of a tavern’s jug.
For these and other reasons, I hereby propose to our esteemed state legislators that we make November 15, Opening Day, a Michigan state holiday, complete with closed banks and no mail, in honor of the socio-economic benefits the deer hunting industry has brought to our communities. If you support my notion, write to me in care of this website and offer your comments.
Someday, if Upper Michigan becomes the 51st state of Superior, we should declare our secession from Lower Michigan on November 15 and make it a double humdinger of a holiday!
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