Weird Holidays

Eggs can achieve so much when they put their minds to it: They can be deviled, fried, scrambled, poached, discarded from the uterus via blood clots, hard boiled and soft boiled...

Every Easter, eggs are dyed all the colors of the rainbow, and little stickers of ducks and bunnies are applied to them, and then the eggs are hidden so that during the Easter egg hunt, the children will become lethargic from all the ham they inhaled at dinner and forget to look for the eggs and instead go back inside to play Super Nintendo, and the eggs remain hidden and explode in July and ruin the exhaust system of the riding lawn mower. Easter celebrates a simpler time, when rabbits laid the eggs and chickens lived underground in warrens. Sometimes we get too wrapped up in the commercialization and excitement of Jesus and the Resurrection and forget the real meaning of Easter, and we fail to instill a love of and respect for eggs in our children. I mean, the love should be in the children. Not the eggs. Unless it's breakfast! Yum! Eggs in all the children!

Eggs were discovered in 1836 by former president James "Dolly" Madison. It's a little known fact that James Madison dabbled in an ancient Native American ritual called "dabbling" wherein a man of "adequate age" would go spelunking into a cave in the mountains and return only when he had found two rocks the right size and shape to stuff into his pants to make him look more appealing to the women in the tribe. Madison was out dabbling one day and emerged from the cave with two smooth, white rocks. Except when he stuffed them in his pants, the rocks broke apart and tiny birds came out of them and pecked off his manhood (and that is how he got the nickname "Dolly"). "These aren't rocks!" he screamed in agony. "These are hard shells full of small birds! Where is my manhood?!" Thus, James Madison is credited in some history books (not any of the ones you've read) with discovering eggs.

After this discovery, the egg industry really began to boom ("BOOM!" "What was that?!" "That was the egg industry!") and this is what historians refer to as "the turning point of the Industrial Revolution". On any high school history exam you will find many questions about "the turning point of the Civil War" and "the turning point of the Revolutionary War" and "the turning point in Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam's Career", but you will be hard-pressed to find anything about the turning point of the Industrial Revolution. This is because for years, eggs have been denied civil rights and have been oppressed and "eggs-iled" from the national consciousness and only recently, in the last fifty years or so, have they begun to receive the respect and recognition they deserve for the part they play in our everyday lives as well as for their admirable history. The Industrial Revolution would have continued to revel and revolve and revolute with no turning point in sight, leveling forests and creating jobs and erecting factories for years and years until all of America looked like Detroit. The only thing that stopped this tragedy from occurring was our hero, the egg. The men in charge of the Industrial Revolution (Franklin D. Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Kennedy, Franklin Mint, and Louis Farrakhan) attended a banquet where deviled eggs containing salmonella were served, and these men ate them and were rendered dead. With no one at the helm, the Industrial Revolution died as well, and America was left with some forest land still intact. So, as you can see, we have eggs to thank for our National Parks and The Blair Witch Project.

America has changed a lot in the past century and we are just now coming to respect and revere eggs for their importance in our nation's history and also their nutritional value. We should be proud of ourselves for having grown so much that we can now recognize an official National Egg Month, especially after the egg's turbulent past.

So put a smile on your face and a couple of eggs in your pants and celebrate May: National Egg Month.