June 5, 2019–While trying to schedule a date for a new event in Fredericksburg, it became a challenge finding a reasonably open weekend. It wasn’t that long ago you could count on a soft time of year where you could slip in a concert or fundraiser when there wasn’t already some type of Fest with a capital F going on.
January used to be one of those times. When we worked on promoting tourism to the town in the early years, one goal was to highlight events and activities in January and February. It brought visitors to a less-crowded town, and helped local merchants spread out the business.
Now, it’s impossible to find any “less crowded” time. Let alone an open weekend.
After some thought, I have, however, come up with a modest proposal to address this egregious lack of leisure time. The answer is simple: add more weekends.
Don’t tell me we can’t dabble with the space-time continuum. After all, twice a year don’t we randomly insert, then take away an extra hour? (No one likes either change, which I find interesting.)
So let’s do the math. Currently, our Fredericksburgian calendar boasts 52 weeks per year. That comes to… let’s see… 52 weekends per year. (Mr. Oyer would be proud of my math skills.)
By deleting only one day per week, we could increase the number of weekends from 52 to 60.8333… Let’s call it 61. That is an additional nine (9) 2-day weekends, an increase in festive fun of 16.6667%!
Think of the repercussions of nine additional weekends! No more consternation trying to figure out where to put that Society of Left-Handed Bell Ringers Concert or Wheelbarrows on Parade. Gillespie County could trot out another horse race; Kerr County could mix in another arts and crafts extravaganza.
So what day do we sacrifice? Do you really need to ask?
What day of the week does everyone hate? Monday! Just get rid of it. Start every week on Tuesday. You skip the Monday blahs and put Hump Day one day closer. Talk about your win-win.
I ran this idea past the directors of local tourist organizations, but for some reason they declined to comment. However, one former city council member did go on record in support of the idea for a reason I hadn’t considered.
“The best thing is there would be no more city council meetings, since they are held on Mondays,” the person said, adding, “The downside is that we would never get our garbage picked up.”
If this works, it opens up a cornucopia of options for tweaking the calendars. Going to a 5-day week, for example, would give us 73 weekends per year, a whopping 40% increase in entertainment options! But that might be asking too much of locals already leery of rising levels of revelry.
Back to that time change. Everyone loves adding an extra hour every fall when we return to standard time. Why don’t we just skip taking it away in the spring, and instead keep adding an hour every few months? It wouldn’t be too long before we’d have inserted a whole other day in the year. Since we still don’t like Mondays, we’d need to come up with another name for that extra day. How about Fred-Day?
It might create other issues. With the extra days, it wouldn’t be long until one year started spilling over into the next. But that’s a problem for our grandchildren to solve.
The rest of us will be too busy enjoying our nine extra weekends.