Another annual celebration is upon us. Each fall we gather to celebrate our affinity for whatever we admire in our culture. Most towns celebrate some heirloom crop that saved them from being annihilated by roving bands of rabid Koala Bears or crack-smoking zombies. Some towns pay homage to mythical stubborn 4-footed hybrid beasts of burden (How silly is that? Everyone knows hybrids can’t reproduce, so where would they come from? It can’t happen). Other hamlets admire sweet and savory desserts in a baked flaky pastry which some people call “pie”.
For some communities a festival is just another excuse for a party. The town of Millstadt has a festival almost every weekend during the summer. They gave up on trying to name all of them, and by July they just yell, “Beer!”. Other citizens know it means there’s an impromptu festival, and immediately go to the city park.
Here in Norris City we have “Dairy Days”. We celebrate at the end of September. The date was chosen because that time of year the weather is anybody’s guess. The temperature can be anywhere from swelteringly jungle-like to Antarctic bone-chilling cold. Torrential rains may or may not occur. This unpredictability adds to the excitement of the festival.
Our “Dairy Days” tradition has a curious and interesting origin. This is the only place you’ll get the real truth, so accept no imitations. Remember, you heard it here first.
Let’s break it down. We’ll start with the word “Dairy”.
Dairy was originally the word “Diary”. It described a place for and an enterprise involved in the business of milk. Key to this enterprise was the “Milkmaid”. They spent long hours at work without the benefit of the smart phone and were typically bored. They started the tradition of writing their thoughts, hopes, and dreams on the sides of cows in charcoal. The more narcissistic ones would draw their own portraits on the cows to show others how pretty they believed themselves to be. Other milkmaids would mark “like” on the cow rumps. The diary musings jotted on cattle gradually became synonymous with the milk operation as a whole. By the 4th century, milk at the Piggly Wiggly and MegaLoMart was always trucked from a “Diary”.
The “Diary” changed meaning when paper was invented. Milkmaids found this new “paper” was easier to write on and more permanent. The milkmaids also found that while it was very difficult to preserve a rose by pressing it between 2 diary cows, bound paper excelled at that task. Diary came to mean a bound book of illogical female rants and detailed plans for control of mankind.
The term “diary” evolved away from the milking operation so the easiest way to rename milk stuff was to change the order of the letters to “dairy”. They already had the letters, so it was easier to use the ones at hand. It also had the added bonus of confusing people, and who doesn’t enjoy that?
The term “Days” normally describes multiple cycles of the clock from daytime to nighttime. This is not the case in “Dairy Days”. “Days” was actually the word “Daze” but spelling was a problem before the spell checker was invented in 1492.
“Daze” was used to describe a person in a drunken stupor. It also came from the dairy (former “Diary”). Our indomitably-spirited milkmaids found that by introducing yeast into a skin bag of milk it would ferment into an alcoholic beverage. They call this Kefir or Kumis. (No need to look it up, because., would I lie? I would not. You know it’s true because some people would try to make alcohol out of anything.) By consuming the drink while they were writing on the sides of their cows they became lethargic, happy, and in a daze.
Incidentally, the skin bags of fermenting milk had to be mixed frequently by being jostled to circulate the little alcohol-making critters in the milk. To make sure the milk wasn’t forgotten about, the skin bags where hung in plain sight by the door. Every time a person went by they would hit, or knock it, to keep it mixed for proper conversion of the milk sugar to alcohol. That is how we started the tradition of knocking on a door. If you didn’t knock the milkmaids would be stuck being sober and would write hateful things about the other milkmaids, which could get them un-friended.
In summary, “Dairy Days” isn’t what you think it is. You think it’s to celebrate agricultural bounty and to honor Dairy Queen. You are wrong. It’s a celebration of bored women with nothing much to do but get drunk and write their thoughts down. Remember while you’re eating your corn candy, funnel trans-fat, and cotton dogs.
Fini
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