On this Presidents Day, I want to wish you and your whole family a joyous holiday filled with the true meaning of what this day represents. In the spirit of the day, cast off your cares and celebrate by going out and. . .buying sheets?
Is Presidents Day white sales the best we can do?
This holiday needs serious work. We don’t even know how to write what its name is. I have seen it as Presidents’ Day; President’s Day; Presidents Day.
It used to be Washington’s birthday, which developed some iconography of its own, and the custom of eating cherry pie. Then Lincoln got thrown in, but we have some iconography for him. Now we also have to celebrate Millard Fillmore, Rutherford D. Hayes, and our controversial recent presidents, completely watering down the holiday’s meaning.
Christian holidays, as even non-Christians admit, are really good, with even secularists enjoying the positive associations they create. Even after the original significance has been pretty much forgotten, as with Valentine’s Day, the day is fun, distinctively different from other days, and is capable of being celebrated.
Of our national holidays, though, only two seem to work in that way: Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. The others have pretty much become days that federal workers don’t have to go in and there’s no mail delivery. Part of the problem is that the government itself sees holidays mainly as time off and so has arbitrarily moved the holiday from the date of the event it is supposed to commemorate so that it will always fall on a Monday, creating long weekends. Columbus discovered America on October 12, not on a long weekend. Of course, the other problem is that we have become so full of national doubts that we aren’t sure some of these national holidays are worth celebrating. Now Columbus Day has become a long weekend of angst-ridden reflection about how Europeans spoiled the New World.
Maybe instead of a Presidents Day holiday we could give each president his own day scattered through the calendar–but with no days off–like the medieval church did with saints’ days. We could thus have a separate observance for Nixon Day, reflecting on a president who is sure to come back into favor with his Wage and Price Freeze and other attempts to control our economy. (Who remembers the shortages?)
We could move the paid vacation to Constitution Day, which is September 17, the day the final draft of our founding document was signed, a holiday that has strangely never caught on.
I’m open to suggestions about what we should do to celebrate Presidents Day.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In