Sadie Hawkins Day

My wife just asked me to marry her.  I didn't pick up the reference and was merely puzzled, hoping that I was not missing some important romantic communication. She then told me it is Sadie Hawkins Day. I figured I had better post about that while I could and learned that February 29 is not Sadie Hawkins Day.  The Real Sadie Hawkins Day is in November, now set officially as Nov 26, and was invented by Al Capp for his Li'l Abner comic strip.  I had always thought this was based on some older Appalachian custom, which is only half true.  February 29th is Bachelor's Day, celebrated mostly in Ireland, though that might have less influence on Scots-Irish than you would initially think.  But the custom was observed in Scotland and Northern England as well, perhaps even centuries back. As these things go, there were further customs and counter-customs, often loosely based on what was considered bad luck because of associations with various religious dates, especially Lent. 

So if there is anyone out there still adhering to the older stereotype of men having any say whatsoever in marriage and weddings and women having to scramble to get in on the game before spinsterhood, have at it.  Pretend it is Sadie Hawkins Day, because how many men are going to know that you're wrong?  And you can still have November 26 as a backup.

Oh, right.  I forgot one of my other motivations for posting this.  It is not inaccurate to say that Al Capp based his characters on the type of people he saw in West Virginia and Kentucky while he was hitchhiking there as a young man. And I will note that though he was making fun of them in many ways you couldn't get away with now, he also showed many with a shrewd wisdom that was not the product of money and education, he humanised them, and he showed their universality with the rest of us despite appearances. But there is another piece as to the origins of the characters. When I went to a statewide studies progra and then worked at a statewide facility, I learned a great deal about communities that had previously only been names on a map. I was told that part of the inspiration for Li'l Abner was the residents of Seabrook, an extremely poor town on the NH coast. People from surrounding towns would snigger or roll their eyes, much as Rush used to poke at the people of Rio Linda, CA. Seabrook got most of its prominence because of the nuclear power plant, but it also had a brief notoriety during the trial of Pamela Smart, who got an underage boy to murder her husband on the basis of his sexual fascination with her. The boy and his co-conspirators were from Seabrook, attending Winnacunnet HS, which serves some more affluent communities as well. Kids from Seabrook were often seen as lesser and saw themselves as one-down in all social situations, which supposedly influenced their readiness to go along with such a scheme.

Al Capp lived for a while in Amesbury, MA, the next town over from Seabrook, and folks in that area claimed that was a larger influence than is generally credited.