Marvelous Magical Mystics

Look at the calendar. We have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and now even Grandparents Day. There are days to celebrate secretaries and bosses. On the list of federal holidays we have Memorial, Independence, Labor, Columbus (Leif Erickson where I’m from), and Veterans days. This is out of a list of eleven holidays, eight of which I remember memorizing in childhood. Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays have been replaced by President’s Day.

There are American holidays in every month except March, April and August, two each in January and November. How can the federal government correct this gross oversight?

Let me make a suggestion.

The season of Spring commences in March. It only makes sense that we should celebrate a federal holiday during this month that celebrates life. Something that brings either a spring to your step, a smirk to your lips or puts the terrors in your heart, depending on your point of view.

There is absolutely, categorically and undeniably no good reason not to have a day to celebrate the mystics in our country. Indeed, in our world.

It’s time to establish Mystics Day as a federal holiday.

We all remember that the Salem witch trials of 1692 and 1693 considerably brightened up life for the dreary Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It didn’t do anything good for the nineteen innocent people found guilty and hung. (I’ve been to the cemetery in Salem where they are buried many times. We’ve talked. Not a witch among them.) It was also an incredibly ignorant and ridiculous case of mass hysteria. The Salem witch trials, if nothing more, proved why my Celtic ancestors hid their Druid spirituality centuries earlier, especially from the Christians and the English.

It’s astonishing to me to see the change in the times. In my childhood it was the rare individual who admitted to being psychic, seeing ghosts or spirits, or having the intuitive gifts of sight, sound and hearing. I recall walking through the South End of Boston forty years ago when the Roma families still lived there and seeing signs in shop windows for Gypsy fortune tellers and psychics. Those shops are long gone.

Today there is a veritable explosion of individuals who will admit to clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience or claircognizance. At one time those of us who saw or communicated with angels and spirits — much less God — were punished, banned and shunned. Lucky us, we were not hung…