Holidays in iCal via Subscription is a MUST

I've been finding lately that the key to a perfect life is a dream. And what's my dream? Well, right now it's having iCal show me when certain holidays are ... without me putting all of them in. So I set out on my quest to find the coveted plug-in/add-on/hack, and after a much rewarding and faithful google search I found it:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/calendars/usholidaycalendar.html

Subscriptions in iCal are amazing things. You might consider them one of those "hidden" or "little known" things on a Mac. This one puts all the standard U.S. holidays in a separate calendar. Apparently, it gets this info from mac.com

But what if you don't live in the U.S.? We Americans are so preoccupied with ourselves we don't realize there are civilized, happy people outside of the "protected" borders of America ... right? Well, not this time at least:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/holidays.html

This is to iCal files as our budget is to deficit. Now these are not subscriptions, but rather actual calendar files. This means they're static. That means they're saved into a calendar (on your harddrive) and never change unless you change them yourself. Besides the several countries supported (U.S. included), some other advantages to this are:

• You can edit the events
• You don't need an internet connection (of course the other option can be set to never refresh, thus not ever needing internet)
• And it's a little less cluttered if you combine it with an already-existing calendar

So, you should definitely check out these. Personally, I prefer the subscription because I don't ever have to mess with it again. But both options "complete" iCal a little bit and make it more like the lo-tech paper calendars we used to use.