How To Make The Holidays Have A More Bookish Bent
And there arose from the stacks such a clatter…
Chatting around the Book Riot water cooler (dispensing book club wine and witty literary rejoinders since the late aughts), this tweet came sailing across our collective radar.
Instead of putting 💰 under your child's pillow, leave him or her a new book! #NationalToothFairyDay
— Random House (@randomhouse) August 22, 2018
That got us thinking, what other holidays and events could we turn more bookish? I took it upon myself to reimagine a more literary holiday calendar.
New Years Day: Carve champagne flutes out of hardbacks. Chuck paperbacks instead of confetti at midnight!
Valentines Day: Chocolates filled with tiny books!
Groundhog Day: Stick a book in the ground! Lift it out! If it sees its shadow, it’s six more weeks of reading!
Mardi Gras: Show us your…tipped-in pages! Saucy!
Presidents Day: Fake Books
Daylight Savings Begins: Read one page ahead in your current book in progress.
St. Patrick’s Day: Dye all your pages green!
Arbor Day: Plant a book!
Easter: Place individual pages in plastic eggs and have a hunt to reassemble the book!
Cinco de Mayo: Book chips and guac!
Summer Solstice: Book Bonfire…wait, no, that’s Fahrenheit 451.
Independence Day: Coat pages with phosphorescent gunpowder! Book Sparklers!
Senior Citizen’s Day: Visit a local senior center and volunteer to read because, hey, sometimes it’s important to do something kind (and I’d want someone to do it for me).
Labor Day: Lift books! Heavy books!
Halloween: Hand out horror comics instead of candy! Better yet, hand out dog-eared copies of those “special” books you keep in your nightstand! They want to be scared? Let their imaginations chew on that.
Daylight Savings Ends: Read one page back in your current book in progress.
Thanksgiving: Make a Diccyloperiodical (that’s a dictionary stuffed with an encyclopedia stuffed with a magazine).
Christmas: Books! On! Ice!
That’s not to say that the original Tweet isn’t without merit. After all, who wants to wake up to a couple of bucks and a pack of gum when they could get be getting a new Babysitter’s Club graphic novel?
What are your favorite book-bent holiday traditions?