Labor Day is one heckuva holiday. First of all, your kids have probably already started back at school. What’s with starting school before Labor Day? In my day, Labor Day was the end of summer. It had meaning. Now what does it mean? It means it’s still summer, but your kids are stuck in school learning to fill in bubbles with Number 2 pencils.
But never fear: Here are some tips for ways to celebrate Labor Day in a more meaningful manner. Your children may gripe, but they’ll thank you someday, I promise.
Have your children show their appreciation for your hard work by doing everything you usually do. They can start with walking the dog, scooping the poop, and cleaning the fish tank. Next, have them clean out the garage and oil all the bike chains. The meals they make may lack the finesse of your meals, but bonus, you get to play with their toys while they cook for you!
Labor Day crafts: collect shoeboxes and clothespins so your child can make a diorama of a sweatshop, complete with stick figures of child laborers. Make sure the back door has a tiny padlock on it!
Labor Day vocabulary: Children can learn a lot from listening to Dad and his salty language while he’s trying to get the coals to light on the grill.
Teach your children to help out someone less fortunate: they can haul water to the brown front lawn of a McMansion that’s under drought watering restrictions.
Make sure your children understand that just as a beehive has worker bees, a queen, and drones, human society has workers of all types: house burglars who make sure you get a new TV occasionally, CEOs who gladly accept the burden of taking on all that money that would corrupt the rest of us, and public representatives who rail against welfare but love all the money the federal government takes from California and spends on their poor states.
Celebrate sex workers! Someday your child might be one, and gosh, you’d want them to be appreciated, right?
Have your children make a list of their top career aspirations. Remind them that firefighting is dangerous, policemen don’t get to use their guns whenever they want to, and sea captains have really small bedrooms. Suggest that they replace those professions with more realistic ones: the world can always use another junk mortgage broker, bored temp agency employee, or telemarketer.
Speaking of telemarketers, love yours on Labor Day. Don’t ask to be put on the Do Not Call list — as him to call every day and chat.
Remind your kids that anyone who works with children has got to be crazy — they can expect low pay and no respect from society. Make sure to instruct them to ask their teachers why they would take such a lousy job when they could make more money as telemarketers.
On Labor Day, remind your kids what made this country great: The Big Three automakers, Enron, and the relaxing of antitrust laws.
Put your money where your mouth is. If you’ve been telling your kids that our public schools already have too much money, start a private school where you charge $7,571 per student, and make sure that half of your kids need specially trained teachers, therapists, and other staff, as well as food because no one thinks to feed them breakfast before school. Then show them that not only can you educate a school full of 800 needy kids on that seven thousand bucks each, but you can also give each student a nifty new laptop. Just don’t tell them which truck the laptops fell out of the back of, because then they might think that you can get quality education for free.
To instill proper concepts of civic duty in your children, visit our local beaches the day after Labor Day, and note the amount of garbage that non-local visitors see fit to leave there. Make sure not to pick up any of it, though. That’s someone else’s labor.
And finally, when you send your children back to school on Tuesday, make sure they haven’t learned a thing. It’s really important to realize that holidays — especially the non-religious ones like Labor Day, Memorial Day, and Martin Luther King Day — are all about vegging out. Lie on the beach, sip your Big Gulp, and make sure to leave the cup sitting there in the sand to memorialize your celebration of yet another important commemoration of American creativity and ingenuity.
ps: Thanks to Sarah and Hubby for their input into these important tips.
