Good Decision Day is TOMORROW!
Forgot to plan for it until now but that's fine, because today is not Good Decision Day. Better not fuck it up tomorrow though!
Transcript (from A.F. Bonnetty & C. d. P. Hassle's Dictionary of Vanishing Folklore, which exists) below:
GOOD DECISION DAY
Annually on 19 April; a celebration in decline since before the turn of the century but still observed generally in coastal areas of Sessan Rue and parts of former Cankershire, and persisting more widely in village and family traditions.
Formerly, Good Decision Day referred to the tradition that on 19th April, it is important to make only good decisions, in order to quiet the inner sense of guilt and regret, and to thereby ward off unnamed but menacing creatures who were believed to emerge between midnight on the 19th and the following dawn, and to be drawn to those who felt that they had not used Good Decision Day well.
The belief is best-evidenced in the traditional Good Decision Day rhyme widespread by the 1830s:
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'My Friends, gather Round, and be Silent, and Listen:
Tomorrow’s the Day we must Make Good Decisions;
So gather your Conscience, prepare for a Test,
And buy lots of Spinach (non-"baby" is best).
When the day Dawns (and you get up on Time)
Prepare to reject even victimless Crime;
To make your own Coffee, drunk Milkless and Bitter;
To pick up that Rubbish; to uninstall Twitter.
Give credit where Due; leave the Toilet Bowl clean;
Say nothing that’s kind-of deniably mean;
And leave not the dishes a-soaking till Late;
Nor browse on your Phone at a quarter past eight.
But how do you know your Decisions are Good?
Just do what you already know that you Should,
The thing that your guilt-thumping Heart says is right -
You'll sleep well the whole Good Decision Day Night.
But if after midnight you're Stricken by Shame,
Awake playing just one more Round of some Game,
Or knowing you ought to have laundered your Sheets,
Or watching that Sitcom you like on repeat…
The Creatures will come to the foot of your bed,
Enticed by the haze of the things that you said,
The stench that rolls off of each unfinished chore.
Your decisions were bad. You will never make more.'
As recently as 1920 it was a tradition in some parts of the country to host raucous celebrations on the evening of Good Decision Day. The intent was to provide those who failed to meet the stringent requirements of the day with a way to distract themselves from their sense of guilt. This would render them invisible to the unnamed enforcers of Good Decision Day, who were believed to detect not bad decisions in themselves but rather the sense of regret which emerges as a result of those decisions. Hence, “the morrow’s regret” and its more contemporary companion “regret it in the morning” as colloquial phrases for a hangover.
The declining tradition of Good Decision Day also survives in phrases like “April rue”, and often finds a home in the oblique hearts of poets, perhaps most notably Eliot’s allusion to the day in his declaration that April is a month of “mixing memory with desire”.
