Have a wild and crazy Presidents Day<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2009\/02\/have-a-wild-and-crazy-presidents-day\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Have a wild and crazy Presidents Day\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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. 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This holiday needs serious work. We don\u2019t even know how to write what its name is. I have seen it as Presidents\u2019 Day; President\u2019s Day; Presidents Day. <\/p>\n

It used to be Washington\u2019s 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\u2019s meaning.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Day, the day is fun, distinctively different from other days, and is capable of being celebrated.<\/p>\n

\nOf 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\u2019t have to go in and there\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.\n

Maybe instead of a Presidents Day holiday we could give each president his own day scattered through the calendar\u2013but with no days off\u2013like the medieval church did with saints\u2019 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?) <\/p>\n

We could move the paid vacation to Constitution Day<\/a>, which is September 17, the day the final draft of our founding document was signed, a holiday that has strangely never caught on. <\/p>\n

I\u2019m open to suggestions about what we should do to celebrate Presidents Day. <\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"