Picnic Day

This last Saturday was Picnic Day, a Davis tradition that has occurred for the past 96 years. About 75,000 people flocked to the UC Davis campus to attend over 200 family friendly events ranging from an entomological petting zoo to a battle of marching bands.



Officially, Picnic Day is UC Davis' annual open house event to showcase the work the campus is doing and allow prospective students and members of the community to investigate the school.


If that sounds unexciting, you would most likely be surprised at the frenzied excitement the average student would convey to you in a description of Picnic Day. The anticipation surrounding the event in the preceding weeks rivals that leading up to Christmas. Indeed, the night before Picnic Day is often compared to Christmas Eve due to the excitement students feel.

You may be skeptical at this point. What could be so great about Picnic Day that a bunch of college students would be so excited about it? Are they really that excited by the prospect of watching wiener dog races and eating overpriced carnival food? You would be right to be skeptical about the excitement surrounding Picnic Day, because none of these things really get the students very excited. I have not yet mentioned the piece of the puzzle that makes Picnic Day such a tremendous holiday on the UC Davis campus.


Alcohol. That's the reason people get so worked up about Picnic Day. It is seen, for whatever reason, as an opportunity to drink all day and then drink all night. Why the student body chooses this one particular day to engage in such raucous behavior while leaving other weekends lifelessly sober is beyond my knowledge. And it would be inaccurate to portray this as the behavior of the entire student body. Really, I would estimate that about sixty percent of the students engage in the revelry while the other half are a bit more temperate. But it is at least a sizable enough chunk of the population that it is noticeable even among the hordes of visitors on campus.


I first encountered the joys of Picnic Day at approximately nine thirty in the morning when I went to breakfast. The unusual thing was that there was a very large line trailing out of the dining commons, which has never occurred at breakfast previously. The reason for the line became apparent once I joined the throng. Normally, there are very few people at breakfast, especially during weekends, because the vast majority of people are taking advantage of the spare time to sleep.


But not on Picnic Day.


No, the people who would usually be recovering from Friday night had gone to bed early the night before, knowing that they would most likely not be sleeping again until Sunday morning. And every minute of Picnic Day is too valuable to waste by sleeping. It is customary for thirsty students to rise around seven in the morning to begin priming their stomachs with a healthy dose of alcohol (the Graduate, a local bar, opens at 6 am to satisfy demand). As I stood in line to get into the DC, I listened as students behind me discussed what clever concoctions they had created to start the day off right. One pair of girls emerged from a dorm visibly inebriated and staggered into line with their other friends, who laughed in an uproar at the silly behavior of the two sloshed girls.


As the day went on, students would disperse throughout the city to join friends at house parties from which they would return without their good sense. It makes a particularly interesting day for the police, who made 33 arrests this Picnic Day. Some inebriates peed on storefronts while others engaged in group fights around the city.

Matt Robbins, the college pastor at the church I'm going to, entered his dog in the frisbee dog competition, so I spent much of my morning with his family watching him compete.

This description of Picnic Day, fortunately, does not really carry over to the campus too much. The dorms definitely have their share of stumbling sots (although my honors dorm insulated me quite nicely), but most of campus is happily occupied by families who are quite content to watch their kids make tie-dye shirts. It was in that environment that I spent most of my day. I floated from parade to sheep dog exposition to A Capella performance and beyond, and the day was quite enjoyable.


So that was Picnic Day.

Pascha

Last Saturday night (the night before Easter) I attended the Orthodox celebration of Pascha (pronounced paw-skuh, like you’re an old Russian guy). It’s basically an Easter service, except that it starts at 11:30 p.m.

And ends at 3:00 a.m. And there are no chairs. And you can’t fall asleep even if you manage to find a wall to lean on because you might drop your lit candle and set the church on fire.

Despite these conditions, I actually quite liked it.

I’d never been to any Orthodox service (or even a Catholic service) before, so just the initial entry into the small sanctuary was a bit of a shock. The room was dark, with only several dim chandeliers providing most of the light, supported by an array of candles resting around the room. A small stage sat at the front of the room, dominated by a lavishly decorated partial wall separating the greater part of the room from a holy area behind the wall reserved for clergy.

At the entryway to the sanctuary sat a small painting bearing the image of some saint, surrounded by more candles, before which entering practitioners would cross and prostrate themselves. As I followed into the sanctuary, an aged male voice somewhere near the front of the room was reading the book of Acts in a monotone voice that sounded not unlike the chanting of a Buddhist monk.

I claimed my piece of territory (meaning that I chose a spot where I would be standing for three and a half hours) and looked around the room. It felt like I had stepped into a church of the year 300 A.D. Moreover, it felt like that church would have been located somewhere East of the Mediterranean.

I’ve heard one of my favorite speakers, Rob Bell, talk about rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion. Rediscovering roots that we might look upon today as weird or foreign. That finally made sense to me as I stood there absorbing the crudely shaded artwork and monotone chanting that filled the room. I figure it was about as close to original church tradition as it gets, and it felt extremely unfamiliar.

The experience after the service was just as novel. Around 3:30, they really got the party started. The members of the congregation had basically followed a vegan diet for lent, so following the service, an outdoor feast featuring all different kinds of meat-centered dishes was unveiled. More interestingly, Orthodox folks seem to have quite the affinity for alcohol (which I'd actually heard about before). It was quite the transition going from the most reverent church service I've ever attended to a party with significant amounts of hard liquor. We didn't stay too long, mostly because it was cold outside.

The guys with whom I went to Pascha. Several are in one of my bible studies.

Needless to say, it was a very interesting night. I'm still digesting the whole experience. I've tried about five times to write out some of my intellectual feelings concerning the service, but each time I've found myself unable to even wrap my head around my thoughts. So perhaps in a future post.


For now, I can simply appreciate that it was a great complement to a regular Sunday morning Easter service.