Your November Birthday: November Holidays, Traditions and More

Though skies may be getting grey and the days getting chilly, November is warm with family traditions as folks get together to celebrate Thanksgiving. But November babies have much more to celebrate besides this best-known holiday. There’s lots of patriotic stuff going on, such as the Marine Corps birthday on the 10^th, Veteran’s Day on the 11^th, and of course Election Day (not always the first Tuesday, but the Tuesday after the first Monday). The Great American Smokeout is on the 20^th, so give your butts the boot! Here are some other things to celebrate:

Monthly Observances

November is National Adoption Month, and also the national month for AIDS awareness, Alzheimer’s disease, American Indian heritage, COPD awareness, family caregivers, Georgia pecans, home care & hospice, impotency, inspirational role models, life writing, marrow awareness, novel writing, peanut butter lovers, pet cancer awareness, pomegranates, roasting and scholarship (or is it scholarships?)

Furthermore, November has also been chosen the official month of diabetes, aviation history, epilepsy awareness, family stories, gluten-free diet awareness, and military family appreciation, as well as being something called Celebrate Empty Nesters Month, so take some recently unburdened parents out for a night on the town!

Weirdest Holiday: This month, there is a three-way tie: Plan Your Epitaph Day (2^nd), Cliché Day (3^rd), and Abet and Aid Punsters Day (8^th), so plan to include a pun on a cliché in your epitaph, is what I say. Sample: Here lies John, a vegetarian and pacifist. All he was saying is give peas a chance.

November Traditions

Flower: chrysanthemum – cheerfulness, friendship

Birthstone: topaz, citrine - fidelity Scorpio’s gem: smoky quartz

Zodiac sign: Scorpio (1- 22) and Sagittarius (23-30; see December for details). Despite its sometimes fiery nature, Scorpio is a water sign, with the characteristics of intuition and adaptability (think of water quickly taking the shape of its container). Scorpios are passionate and loyal, but tend to be sensitive and oh, that tail has a sting! Try not to take things personally, now. Best friends: Pisces and Cancer. Best love matches: Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn.

Famous Birthdays: Aishwarya Rai (1st), Marie Antoinette (2^nd), Adam Ant (3rd), Erasmus James (4th),Vivian Leigh (5^th), Sally Field (6^th), Marie Curie (7^th), Katharine Hepburn (8^th), Nick Lachey (9th), Tracy Morgan (10th), Demi Moore (11th), Grace Kelly (12^th), Paul Simon (13^th), Condoleezza Rice (14th), Kevin Eubanks (15th), Maggie Gyllenhaal (16th), Rock Hudson (17^th), Owen Wilson (18th), Indira Gandhi (19^th), Robert F Kennedy (20^th), Voltaire (21^st), Scarlett Johansson (22nd), Billy the Kid (23rd), Katherine Heigl (24th), Tina Turner (25^th), Charles M Schulz (26^th), Bill Nye (27th), William Blake (28^th), Vin Scully (29th). Mark Twain (30^th).

Catholic Feast Days

1-Feast of All Saints, St Marcel of Paris, St Mathurin

2 – Feast of All Souls

3- Feast of Ste Alpais, St Hubert, St Malachy O’More, St Martin de Porres, St Pirminus, St Rumwald, Ste Winifred

4 – Feast of St Americus, St Charles Borromeo

5 – Feast of Ste Elizabeth, St Kay

6 – Feast of St Leonard, St Winnoc

7 – Feast of St Florentius, St Willibrord

8 – Feast of The Four Crowned Martyrs

9- Feast of St Benen, St Theodore the Recruit

10- Feast of St Aedh Mac Breic, St Andrew Avellino, St Leo the Great, Ste Nympha

11-Feast of St Martin of Tours, St mennas, St Astericus

12-Feast of St Emilian, St josephat, St lebuin

13-Feast of Ste Agostina Pietrantoni, St Brice, St Diego Alcalá, Ste Francis Cabrini, St Homobonus, St Nicholas I, St Pontian, St Stanislaus Kostka

14-Feast of St Lawrence O’Toole

15-Feast of St Albert the Great, St Leopold, St Zachary

16-Feast of Ste Gertrude the Great, Ste Margaret of Scotland

17-Feast of Ste Elizabeth of Hungary, Ste Hilda, St Gregory the Wonder Worker, St Hugh of Lincoln, Ste Rose Phillippine Duchesne

18-Feast of St Odo of Cluny, the Blessed Miguel Pro

19-Feast of St Nerses I, St Anastasius II

20-Feast of St Bernward

21-Feast of Mary, Queen of Peace (El Salvador); St Gelasius

22-Feast of Ste Cecilia

23-Feast of St Clement, St Columbanus

24-Feast of Stes Flora & Mary

25-Feast of Ste Catherine of Alexandria, St Mercury

26-Feast of St John Berchmans

27-Feast of St Maximus, St Francis Antony Fasani

28-Feast of St James of the Marches, St Stephen the Younger, Ste Catherine Labouré

29-Feast of Dorothy Day

30-Feast of St Andrew

Don’t have a November birthday? Check out these other months:

January - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2017/01/your-january-birthday-january-holidays.html
February -  http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/02/your-february-birthday-february.html
March - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/03/your-march-birthday-march-holidays.html
April -  http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/03/your-april-birthday-april-holidays.html
May - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/05/your-may-birthday-may-holidays.html 
June - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2017/05/your-june-birthday-holidays-traditions.html
July - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2017/07/your-july-birthday-july-holidays.html
August -  http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/07/your-august-birthday-august-holidays.html
September - https://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2019/08/your-september-birthday-september.html
October - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/09/your-october-birthday-october-holidays.html
December - http://bucketofuseful.blogspot.com/2016/12/your-december-birthday-december.html

Image of chrysanthemum from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/chrysanthemums-composites-blossom-2793019/

Why You Should Never Trust Spell Check

I have a love/hate relationship with Spell Check. I love it because I'm a very good speller, but a horrible typist. Before the days of this brilliant invention, I would have to hunt and peck very slowly to make sure that everything came out correctly, having no instinctive feel for keyboarding, which was a frustrating damper on my creative flow, I'll tell ya. But now I can go hell-bent for leather (I don't even know what that means-did Judas Priest make that up?) and when I come up for air, all of my typos are helpfully underlined in red. 

But here's the hate part: Sometimes typos are still real words. If you leave an 'o' off of 'too', replace the 'c' in 'cough' with a 'd', or transpose the vowels in 'lion', your Spell Check is not going to see it as a mistake. Also, sometimes misspelled words are still real words. If you leave the 'u' out of fourth or have a homophonic brainlapse and write 'accept' when you meant 'except', who is Spell Check to kick about it? Nobody, that's who.

Here's one more reason not to trust it to do your proofreading for you: proper nouns and made-up words. When you know Spell Check won't recognize the spelling of a proper name (Smith, no problem; Nkwoze, problem) or a silly word you made up for 'flavor', it's easy to ignore the red underlines, but what if you still managed to misspell the thing? Mr. Nkwoze might feel slighted if he sees his name as Knowze and people think he's Beyonce's dad. (I know it's Knowles. Don't write in.) For example, I initially typed the non-standard 'brainlapse' as 'brianlapse'. If I had bypassed giving it a once-over simply because I knew Spell Check couldn't handle it, I might have left people with the impression that I would be a better writer but for lack of Brian. (I miss you, Brian! Call me!)

The moral of the story is: Spell Check is a tool, not a contractor. Before you send your creations out into the world, give them a good read or even have someone else read them (frequently we will miss our own mistakes because we already know what we're trying to say, but they will pop out at someone else). Heck, read 'em twice. It's called editing. I know some errors will still get through (I was aghast at seeing a typo in the title of a story I did that was featured on the front page of Yahoo, so I'm no stranger to public humiliation), but we do our best.

Free use image from Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/keyboard-computer-keys-white-886462/