Few marked days!!?

What are we expected to do on days like Independence Day?
We normally pray, but what is expected of us on a festival day?
And if we take a look at our modern day calender, we find many days marked with different names. Why do you think people find it necessary to celebrate them specially?
Are they just another gimmick of greeting card sellers?
Or is there some reason behind these (un) necessary celebrations?
May be, there is…
As a child, I never understood why they telecast the same movie on every Independence Day. But today, I know in our busy life, how fastly we forget things. We have little time to receive the invaluable values that our forefathers wanted to pass onto us for a better society. Even if we managed to read them somewhere, they get lost in the noises of our busy life. Those movies serve as reminders of what is expected of us, but how many of us watch them?
Today, I could really appreciate the celebration of festivals as times where in elders cultivate good thoughts in the youngsters, who carry them along and build their character.
They are the times when they work in unison to perform many activites from cleaning to decorating and sharing to celebrating. How many of us bother to celebrate festivals together?
As kids, many might recollect kissing mom goodbye and walking along with dad to the school gate. But consider today's kids who get to spend time with their parents only in the weekends! We are familiar with times when people expressed their love for each other through eyes and little smiles. Times have changed drastically, thanks to the internet, now it is not even necessary to see each other to fall in love, let alone their eyes and smiles!
Yes, time has changed and brought with it, changed priorities. It also brought along fear that human values and expressions might be treated with less importance. With the movie on Independence Day attracting fewer audience and festivals gathering lesser crowd with each passing year, popularity of expressing one’s love on few marked days is growing. Not to say that today’s practises can replace emotions of the olden days. Never.
But may be the fact, that few days serve as reminders of those important acts, which we want to do, but rarely managed to, is making me appreciate them. If you are one among those who still manage to allocate time daily for all the activities you consider important, you are lucky. Else, you may want to make it a practice to do them on atleast few marked days!