I imagine some people are celebrating Labor Day… which is today, according to my calendar.
An opportunity to celebrate labor. Or not.
When I was much younger than today, I spent one summer as a house painter’s apprentice, and I learned that a “holiday” was a spot on the wall that accidentally didn’t receive any paint, and needed to be fixed.
Later, when I was married, I learned that a “holiday” was, for my wife Darlene, an opportunity for me to repaint the house.
Clearly, “holiday” has meant different things to different people, throughout history.
The word holiday comes from the Old English word hāligdæg, which had nothing at all to do with house painting. It meant, essentially “Holy Day” and referred exclusively to special religious celebrations. As the English language traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, religious practices somehow got mixed up with an opportunity to grill hot dogs after spending the day on a ladder.
A Baptist friend of mine claims that every day is a holy day, which seems to imply that he is constantly doing chores around the house.
In England, where the transformation of their language didn’t require weeks of seasickness while attempting to escape from oppressive “holy days” promoted by the Anglican Church, the term “holiday” now refers, very sensibly, to a “vacation”. Preferably in the south of France.
Australians and New Zealanders use the word “holiday” in the same sense as the English. But likely, not in the south of France.
Here in America, “holiday” has retained its original connection with labor, or lack thereof.
Keeping track of holidays has become a full-time job for some of us, like for example the folks who run the website, NationalToday.com
From an article about U.S. holidays by researchers Alyssa Fowers, Andrew Van Dam, Kevin Schaul, and Shelly Tan that appeared in The Washington Post last week:
The American holiday landscape is scattered across the internet, so we set out to gather a definitive list of secular celebrations. We started with all of the holidays listed on four sites: National Today, Days of the Year and Holidays Calendar, plus the electronic version of Chase’s Calendar of Events, a book of holidays that has been in publication since 1957…
National Today creates what founder Ben Kaplan calls “ownable moments” for marketing clients. Over the past 10 years, the site has grown into a full-service holiday shop: Starting at $1,000, a 20-person team from TOP Agency will workshop, publish and publicize a holiday, down to the creation of custom baseball caps.
Nothing says “holiday” like a custom baseball cap, if you don’t mind getting a little paint on it.
The Washington Post researchers did an analysis of U.S. holidays and ranked 5,700 of them. Who knew we had 5,700 holidays each year? And it’s worth noting, this total didn’t include actual religious holidays. So Christmas and Easter don’t appear in the results.
But for some reason, they included Halloween, which I’ve always considered to be religious. Ditto, St. Patrick’s Day.
To measure how real each holiday is, we checked whether it is recognized by government bodies, if people see it on their calendars by default and how much attention it gets from the public.
Putting those measures together helped us separate Presidents’ Day (February 17) from the Presidential Joke Day (August 11).
The “most real” non-religious U.S. holiday, they decided, was Thanksgiving (which, for obvious reasons, falls on the same day as the National Day of Mourning, celebrated by certain Native American tribal members, and others, myself included.)
Labor Day ranked sixth on the list, in terms of “realness”. Here are the 14 “most real” holidays. (Secular holidays, that is.)
The list struck me as slightly politicized. But everything is politicized these days.
I guess we all have our ideas about which holiday is “most real” or “most worth celebrating”.
Speaking for myself, I’m really sad that I missed celebrating National Presidential Joke Day on August 11. Possibly the best holiday in America?
This celebration was inspired by a joke made by then-President Ronald Reagan, on August 11,1984, during a soundcheck for his regular Saturday evening radio broadcast on NPR.
Reagan said, “My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
What he didn’t know was that the feed was live.
The comments were denounced by the Soviet government, Pravda, Izvestia, and TASS as “unprecedentedly hostile”
Certain Americans were tickled by the situation, however, and decided to memorialize Reagan’s faux pas by establishing National Presidential Joke Day.
Ever since, our Presidents have been jokers.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.