I Love Zombie Day
Zombie Thursdays is a weekly feature with guest blogger, Miranda. You can read more about her here.
February is a short little month filled with many holidays. In fact, February may be the most festive month of all! First we celebrated Groundhog’s Day, an odd, but cute little holiday. Next was arguably the best one of all-- my birthday! It was also George Romero’s birthday as you may have learned from last week. Throw in some presidents’ birthdays, and a leap day and you have one packed month!
This weekend most of the world will be celebrating another holiday that revolves all around love! No... I’m not talking about stupid Valentine’s Day. I’m referring to “I Love Zombies Day.”
Yes, apparently February 13th is to become the official day to celebrate the love of the undead.
I first heard about this somewhat dubious holiday via Twitter. Twitter, like most of the interwebz, isn’t always the most reliable source of information. Anybody can say or post anything online (often with bad grammar and punctuation) which should make one suspect of everything seen and read. I recently changed my Twitter from private back to public. When I first joined publicly, I would make a tweet thing and depending on whatever random word I happened to put in it, I would start to get followed by random people. Example-- I made a post about how I was going to go cook some dinner. I was almost immediately followed by a person/site that sells cookware. This type of random following makes no sense to me. I was certainly not going to start following this cookware person; in fact, I blocked them almost as quickly as they started following me.
The point of that story is that I went on private for a long time to end these random followers and only recently went public again. As such, I am still getting those random followers. Only now, several of them have been zombie-related followers, a few of which I have started to follow. It was from one of these zombie tweeters that I read about “I Love Zombies Day.”
Being the suspicious interwebz outsider that I am, at first I thought this celebration was no more than some ‘meme’ thing created by a bored zombie-loving tweeter. Further investigation was required!
As it turns out, I was half correct. Obviously, this is a made up holiday and this Saturday marks the first year in which there is an official day to celebrate your love of zombies. My thought was that it would have come from a source like FEARnet (the creators of last week’s “tweet like a zombie day”) or Bloody-Disgusting-- in other words, a well known horror site. The origins are from the creators of a digital art magazine called Imagine Magazine that seems to showcase artists in storyboards, comics, graphic novels, voice actors, video game art designers, and more.
One of Imagine’s contributors, Anthony Zummo, really loves his zombies. And it was he who came up with the idea of I.L.Z. Day. According to his lengthy blog post about why he loves zombies, he states:
We, as people of creative minds, should embrace the zombie in the month of February and start “I LOVE ZOMBIES DAY” as an official holiday on Feb 13th. Halloween is fun for all monsters, but only February is the month for love. So I am suggesting that we come together with our loved ones and watch a zombie movie, play a zombie video game or read a great zombie graphic novel and share in the ravenous behavior of the horde.
Being a zombie lover myself, one might assume that I would be all over and about this holiday. But I’m not sure if I am. Maybe it is the close proximity and close resemblance and comparison to Valentine’s Day, a holiday that I hate, that is making me a bit uneasy. Valentine’s Day is supposed to be the one day a year where everyone goes all mushy and tells each other that they love them. Shouldn’t we tell our loved ones this every day? Shouldn’t we show our love and appreciation every day? I love zombies, and I try to celebrate that love every single day. I watch zombie films all the time, I play zombie games, I listen to zombie music, I wear zombie clothing, and I write a weekly zombie blog. I don’t believe I need one special day a year to really promote that love, just as I don’t need Valentine’s Day to really show my loved ones how I feel.
Am I being cynical? An “I Love Zombies Day” Grinch? Maybe. Last week I supported “Tweet Like a Zombie Day” since it was actually a celebration of George Romero and his birthday. The day had background, substance, and meaning (especially for me). It was in no way random or rushed as I feel this holiday is.
Despite my misgivings and cynicism, I still wish this holiday the best of luck. I recognize the fact that not everyone is quite as zealous as I am when it comes to zombies, so maybe the rest of the world does need this February 13th holiday. I suppose anything that draws attention to some Zombie Loving can’t really be all that bad, even if it is super interwebz random!
The website is also featuring a contest for those who choo-choo-choose to celebrate. Take a photo of yourself dressed as a zombie, playing a zombie game, watching a zombie film, or whatever and send it in to Imagine Daily. The top three will win some sort of “I Love Zombies” t-shirt and an autographed Issue #1 of the graphic series Quarantine donated by the artist and author! A pretty cool prize, to be sure!
Come Saturday, I will put my pride aside and will be getting my zombie on and helping the cause by tweeting #ilovezombiesday. I will have just driven back from
What are your thoughts on internet holidays and holidays in general?
Happy ‘I Love Zombies Day’ and Happy Valentine’s Day... I guess.