There’s color in February if you look hard enough
- Brett Hiner: A Work in Progress
- February 27, 2025
- 571
If the timing has worked out, you will be reading this column just as we have flipped the calendar to March. And … thank goodness.
The older I get, the more it seems to be that February is the struggle — the month I feel I am wading through molasses, struggling to find a clearer path where the sunlight breaks through the smoke-infused grayness of the sky and melted brown sugar sludge covering the ground.
Every year my father celebrates his birthday in February. This year was No. 86, and regardless of the pink reprieve Valentine’s Day briefly allows for, he reminds me every year that it is the “ugliest month in which to celebrate a birthday.” (For those with February birthdays, it is only his opinion).
It got me to thinking: I wonder how many of those 86 birthdays he has spent outside of Ohio and the winter doldrums we attach to the month. He was in the United States Air Force from 1961-65, stationed in Turkey for a bit, but a quick search on AccuWeather.com tells me, “February in Turkey sees limited sunshine, with an average of five hours of daylight per day. The average daily temperatures range from around 41 F in Istanbul and the western regions to 30 F in the eastern and mountainous areas.”
Hmm, a slightly warmer version of Ohio with even less daylight. That must not have helped his perspective.
His last year of service was spent at the former March Air Force Base in Riverside, California. Average February temperature? Sunny and 69 F. Now we are talking. But when it comes to the weather, I would doubt one pleasant year, out of 86, does little to change one’s opinion of the month.
It is not as if February and those who are in power of such decisions have not tried to make the month more enjoyable.
In 2004 the NFL moved the Super Bowl to February, in part because of lengthening the number of games played in the regular season. But fans in Northeast Ohio have yet to experience anything pleasurable about the Cleveland Browns being in a Super Bowl (and loyalists know that accomplishment seems as far away as ever). For Clevelanders, the start to February is really just an annual reminder of the misery of being a Browns fan. If it ever happens, maybe that will change my father’s tune regarding February.
I recently learned that while October is National Pizza Month, Feb. 9 is National Pizza Day. My initial guess as to why revolves around the notion that perhaps it had something to do with an immaculate pizza delivery — some pizza delivery aficionado, traveling through the most dangerous of terrains, under the most challenging of circumstances, to deliver the longed-for pie to a long-lost love hundreds of miles away.
Nope.
I guess Feb. 9 was just an arbitrarily chosen day. I did learn, however, that the Guinness World Record for a pizza delivery involved Paul Fenech hand-delivering a pizza to Niko Apostolakis. Fenech left “Opera Pizza” in Madrid, Spain on June 28 and delivered the pizza to Apostolakis in Wellington, New Zealand on July 1, which is a distance of 12,346 miles. This took four days — not sure how warm the pizza would have been upon delivery, but the effort is worth celebrating, just not in February, apparently.
February also is the national month to celebrate: tater tots (Feb. 2), wine drinking (Feb. 19), carrot cake (Feb. 3), crepes (Feb. 2), boiled peanuts (Feb. 21) and, my personal favorite, the ukulele (also Feb. 2). Michael Lynch, aka “Ukulele Mike,” established ukulele day to “bring the world together, four strings at a time.” Now that seems like a cause we can all get behind.
Sadly, Lynch passed away unexpectedly in 2018, but not before flooding YouTube with tutorials and videos on the ukulele. One might watch them with the same sentiment felt when watching a Bob Ross painting video. His spirit turns gray moments into colorful ones.
Interestingly enough, gray was perhaps the color I most used in my youth. As a fan of Batman and the Dallas Cowboys (I have since come to my senses) in the days of Tony Dorsett, Ed “Too Tall” Jones and coach Tom Landry, gray was a necessity when drawing and coloring the Cowboys helmet and Batman’s costume. Silver was always out of reach for the four Hiner kids — that was a color reserved for my well-off classmates who could afford the box of 64. Gray was it.
I like to think what we lacked in crayon numbers we made up for in imaginative color integration — merging any colors to create Jackson Pollack-style masterpieces.
Crayola just announced that for the first time in its 122-year history, it is bringing back a collection of eight nostalgic fan-favorite retired crayon colors. These include Orange Red, Violet Blue, Lemon Yellow and Raw Umber (all retired in 1990); Blizzard Blue, Magic Mint and Mulberry (retired in 2003); and Dandelion (retired in 2017). All colors clearly reserved for the 64 box, but all colors that a child somewhere needs to complete their own masterpiece.
And maybe that is why Crayola made this announcement in February, knowing we all need a little color in our lives — colors that help nurture and inspire creative moments, colors with cooler names than gray, colors that splash across our visual fields, making us forget the doldrums of “the ugliest month in which to celebrate a birthday.”
While he has already received this year’s birthday gift, on my next trip home, I think I know what to bring my dad.
Brett Hiner is in his 28th year teaching English/language arts at Wooster High School, where he also serves as yearbook adviser and Drama Club adviser/director. When writing, he enjoys connecting cultural experiences, pop and otherwise to everyday life. He can be emailed at workinprogressWWN@gmail.com.