I don’t own a skateshop, but my best friend does. I do run my local shop’s website, but that’s just because I’m pretty OK at being a geek… if I owned and operated a skateshop, I’m pretty sure I’d fail miserably because I’d wind up setting up and riding every board in the shop, and I’d waste every sticker on the shelf… I can’t stand to see a sticker being unused… I’d plaster everything with ‘em, especially my car windows... it would be like a really cheap way of tinting them or something.

Anyway, my friend received this packet from the IASC that involves all of the instructions one could possibly need to create an effective skateboard-related holiday. While it does offer some legit, common sense advice that might aid some shops in how to organize an event (props to that), it also promotes the idea of putting the official “Go Skateboarding Day” logo on all of the promotional materials you push out to the public. On one hand, this is consistent with other holidays:

1. When you think of Christmas, you either think of Santa or the baby Jesus.
2. When you think of Easter, you think of Jesus or anthropomorphic bunny rabbits.
3. When you think of Valentine’s day, you think of hearts (though a few of you think of the martyrs Saint Valentines of Rome, and/or Saint Valentines of Terni, whom some scholars think may have been the same person… oddly enough, that’s another Jesus connection, seeing as how they got all martyred and stuff).

For most traditional holidays, you have either a religious or secular iconic symbol that you can point at and say “Oh hey, iconic figure! You represent (blank) holiday!” In the case of Go Skateboarding Day, that icon is a logo that’s pretty much a variation of the IASC’s, which is itself a corporate collective of dues-paying companies, marketers, and like I mention elsewhere… Fed Ex.
The logos in question:

For those of you shop owners (or potential event-holders) that lack the time or technical knowledge to make flyers, the IASC was nice enough to give you the opportunity to purchase Go Skateboarding Day propaganda through their “supporting printer”.

If you were to equate this to Christmas, it would be like buying presents from one of Jesus’ business partners!

All in all, this is capitalism at it’s best, which is all fine and good. Personally, I think it’s corny, and I think it reeks of a skateboard industry doing everything it can to sell out skateboarding. More on that in the “about” section of this site.