Invent a holiday! Explain how and why everyone should celebrate.

Many, many years ago an incident happened at a school where I was working that fits this special holiday or celebration idea.

We had a team of gardeners who were responsible for keeping our lawns and our garden beds up and also for removing any trees that were a threat or a danger to children and passers-by – because of the falling branches and so on.

One particular tree was removed but the contractors left a very ugly stump with very exposed roots jutting out of the ground and told me that they would be back later to attend to it.

Over the next number of months, the stump remained where it was. I went to the grounds contractors several times – in fact, many times – and asked that the tree stump be removed.

Patience sometimes comes to an end so I declared to the children at the school that we were going to have a special “in school celebration“ to honour the survival of this tree stump. I This would be a special day of birthday remembrance for the tree stump.

A lot of children had the same sort of imagination as myself and thought that that would be absolutely glorious. So we started to organise to celebrate The tree stump’s survival in a special way.

Out of courtesy, I contacted the grounds maintenance people to let them know that in two or three days time we were going to be holding a special commemerative anniversary to celebrate the tree stump’s capacity to survive. We were going to have a special cake made to commemorate the stump and would actually place the cake on the stump and cut the cake using the stump as a base for a table.

Sadly, our plans were aborted.The very next day the gardening crew arrived and took the stump from its position, and ground out the root system to boot.

Which goes to suggest to me that there are more ways of killing a cat then choking it with cream.