Red Orange Yellow Day

Long ago, I had a terrific boss who insisted that every year the staff celebrate Red Orange Yellow Day. I’m not sure if he made it up, or if there really is such a thing.

The celebration was always held in the third week of January, a month famous for gray skies, dirt-speckled snow, and cold toes.

The idea was to brighten everyone up through the mid-winter blues, and it certainly was effective. Everyone on the staff wore the requisite colors, and we shared a pot-luck lunch. A lot of creativity went into the color scheme: salsa, ziti, orange juice, rainbow sherbet, lemon meringue pie. Every year, one renegade brought guacamole. After lunch we all needed Alka-Seltzer. Didn’t matter–our hearts were brighter, for sure.

There’s something to his theory, even without the ziti and the pie. Bright colors can help to elevate mood and battle depression, of course. But it’s really all about light–that’s what we’re starved for, even more than warmth, in this bone-chilling cold winter.

It’s another example of how closely we humans are tied to nature’s cycles. How much we need the sun. We’re just another species of mammal, trying to get through the winter, lacking the physiological resources to hibernate. So we tunnel through the snow and the darkness as best we can, like the gray squirrels and the deer. The bright colors of red, orange, and yellow are all but absent in the winter, but the very sight of them brings the light of summer to our color-starved spirits.