I wonder if they do this in Athens, too

Via A Saintly Salmagundi: "Squirrel Town, U.S.A. "

For years around Ville Platte the opening day of squirrel season—the first Saturday in October—has been known as “Squirrel Day.” Schools close early the day before—some don’t open at all—because attendance by students and teachers alike is cut in half. Businesses shutter their windows. Everybody heads for “camp,” they call it, and that can mean a sleeping bag in the back of a pickup truck or a deluxe hunt lodge wired for electricity, with air-conditioning and big-screen TVs. “Squirrel Day is the Cajun Passover,” explains Ville Platte native Tim Fontenot. “There’s a mass exodus into the woods.”

It’s lunchtime on Thursday at the Pig Stand, and already the impending squirrel opener is apparent. The air at Ville Platte’s most popular diner is spiced with red pepper and smoked pork and a near suffocating dose of perfume. The Sacred Heart Homecoming Court has arrived for lunch, fresh from a pep rally at crosstown rival Ville Platte High School, and 17 blondes and brunettes with Barbie hair crowd tables loaded with pig. On Squirrel Day weekend, football games at most Evangeline Parish high schools are bumped up to Thursday night. Play them on Friday, locals explain, and nobody would show. “The day before the hunting season opened you could count on at least 50 percent absenteeism,” Bobby Hamlin, the principal at Ville Platte High School, tells me. “Even the teachers played hooky, so it cost the parish a fortune in substitute teacher fees. That’s why the schools started closing. They call it ‘Budget Day’ now, on the official calendar. But everybody knows it’s Squirrel Day.”

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