Utterly Meaningless

You young thing!

“When I was a kid” we celebrated both Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday, but memory fails as to whether schoolchildren had both days as holidays. We definitely colored in mimeographed worksheets about Washington and Lincoln. (ahhh, the smell of fresh ditto sheets — hmmm, I wonder if we coulda been busted under zero tolerance for huffing dittos?)

The generic Presidents’ Day doesn’t seem to mean much of anything, other than shopping. What _are_ we celebrating about presidents, other than that we have them? With the birthdays, you knew where you stood. 🙂

Wikipedia has the history:
en.wik...;_Day_(United_States)

I miss the smell of mimeograph copies.

Dad and Mom wrote and edited Sunday School curriculum for our church. I remember Dad having to come upstairs from the basement numerous times to avoid passing out from the mimeograph fumes.

We had both holidays off when I was in elementary and junior high school. We were such slackers.

It wasn’t this shifting of holidays to a more convenient Monday either. I’ve no objection to that for the holidays createed to a theme (Memorial, Labor, Veteran’s Day) but holidays to commeorate an event should be held on the day of the event.

Mmm, mimeographs. I love purple, but I can’t to this day look at something written in purple ballpoint ink and not have a brief flash that it’s a mimeograph.

Our DMV here in CT was off half of Friday and Saturday (normally a half day) for the holiday, since they’re normally closed on Monday. I found that out when I tried to call Friday at 1.

Funny to see Veteran’s Day as any-old-time example because it ISN’T just a theme day. It commemorates an actual event from ” the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month”. . . and when Congress got cute with that for three-day weekend convenience, the public wouldn’t have it.

Not to mention that dates that seem so specific and historical, like December 25 and July 4, aren’t quite as historically correct as we think. 🙂

The g-schools in NY in the ’60s got both Washington’s and Lincoln’s BD off. When we moved down to SC in ’74, Lincoln’s BD was a non-event. IIRC we got REL’s BD off instead.

When IS that??
(I probably should know but they didn’t teach it in my school!)

1/19.

Inconvenient that all these national figures were born in Jan-Feb . . .

Re: theme days: Realized that about VD after I was offline. Bleh.I got on a roll with the names. Nothing derogatory was meant by the description, I couldn’t think of a better differentiation. Presidents’ Day though, is absolutely in this realm.

I did think about July 4 and Dec 25 and decided I didn’t want to go there.

Why have we kept Thanksgiving as the odd duck THURSDAY holiday it is, given how many other holidays that have been moved for convenience.

Not that I have a problem with it. I’ve always been rather fond of having differing days off. I like three day weekends, but I like a day in the middle of the week too. I’m more likely to just take the latter as a holiday. Of course, most of my work has been with animals, and reality says that I’ll be lucky if I really get to take half a day on any given holiday, since the critters still want feeding.

We have creeping convenience in holidays too. In recent years, I’ve heard more than one suggestion to move trick or treating for Halloween to a Saturday.

Heck, no derogatory inference, just thinking along with the holiday theme.
HEKs btw, seem to me less tied generally to celebrating on the public schedule, generally more independent in their rhythms and responses. No doubt why HEKs are such a threat to the commonweal!

We still celebrate Lee-Jackson Day in VA – though it’s mostly Richmond and points south.

Speaking of the DMV and holi-day surprises — we saw a devout young dancer friend yesterday at the studio with a stunned look on her face. It was her 16th birthday and she had been waiting after school to take her driver’s road test fopr her first real license, when God apparently sent a HAILSTORM to signal he had other plans for her . . .