I would rather holidays meant something. Things like eating home-cooked food or being with your family can be done any day, and honestly should, people use holidays as an excuse to be assholes in the meantime all too often. You ever seen a Catholic Lent and Easter? That means something, they're in direct communication with their God, expressing sympathy and gratitude for all he's done for 'em. Ever seen a Day of the Dead celebration- a real one, not one of those elementary-school knockoffs? Paper-mache skulls aren't just an alternate-culture substitute for jack-o-lanterns, that's the day when the ****ing dead come out and chill with their families, and the towns have a big ****ing party for 'em. It's really ****ing bizarre if you didn't grow up with it (and especially if "dead coming back to life" means "Night of the Living Dead" to you, like it does me), but it has meaning, there's a reason it's that day that doesn't have anything to do with companies trying to sell you ****, and it's an experience genuinely worth having.
And some holidays, they just shouldn't exist now. Thanksgiving... what business do British people have celebrating that? It doesn't have anything to do with them. Hell, it really doesn't have anything to do with Americans anymore- it's a harvest festival (and a very specific one, there are plenty of other harvest festivals for cultures that still know what a harvest is), and these days when anything we eat comes from some anonymous location thousands of miles away when it's still growing season, there's no such thing as a harvest anymore unless you live on one of the few self-sufficient farms left around. Thanksgiving only lives on as a day the meat industry rakes it in, and pasting up something that looks vaguely like a turkey or hat with a buckle on it means there's something on sale today.
I'd rather our gas didn't just come from the pumps and our dinners from the stores. I'd rather there was a reason we lived our lives the reason we do more than just that that's the way irritating voices on the airwaves say is the right way to do it. I'd rather people knew why, or at least gave a rat's ass. You wanna know the reason everything's so ****ed, why Bush is waging wars for Halliburton at the expense of all of us and everything you eat and wear was essentially made by slave labor and a ridiculous percentage of the country here won't eat enough today while we're throwing out excess food by the metric ton and nobody gives a ****? That's why, and it won't be long before we're all thoroughly screwed because of it. What were the figures on how long the current oil supply will last again? Oh, wait, nobody cares. Won't be our grandchildren who have to deal with it, it won't be our children, it'll be us in the not-so-distant future who'll be back to the goddamn Dark Ages, and nobody cares, nobody wants to hear that anything they do means something. Especially not that it doesn't mean life'll go on as ordinary and there'll always be a happy ending like we keep getting told.