Don’t Undersell Labor Day

Holiday Cousins
or
Labor Day Appreciation Post

 

Our vast range of holidays are far from equal, varying widely in celebration, reverence, and/or fun. Many lack defining characteristics given to the more ostentatious holidays: Halloween with its costumes and jack-o-lanterns, Thanksgiving with its turkeys and overeating, St. Patrick’s Day with its shamrocks and drunkenness, and Christmas with its two month commercialization and capitalist excess. Other holidays, despite an absence of set traditions, are blessed with a self-explanatory name: Mother’s Day, Veterans Day, New Year’s Day. But some holidays can be harder to keep track of or to understand their significance; two American holidays which fit this description are Memorial Day and Labor Day. 

     
Can you tell which picture is of Labor Day and which is of Memorial Day?

Similar in our  minds, we often get Memorial Day and Labor Day confused; we interchange them, sometimes saying one when we mean the other. These somewhat vague holidays share two common traits: they both involve a three-day week created by a Monday off from work, and they both bookend the summer season. Memorial Day, falling on the last Monday in May, is the unofficial first Day of Summer, while Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is the unofficial last day of Summer.

I like to think of these two days as “Holiday Cousins.”

An Introduction to National Politics: The Time I Shook Hands with Bill Clinton

1992

Every second Monday, after leaving the wild exuberance of the lunchtime playground and returning to the dark confines of the classroom, my third grade class would find a magazine waiting on each of our desks. We universally loved these magazines. Not only did they interrupt the monotony of our regular lessons, they were the only printed words available to us in school that didn’t come from a textbook, worksheet, or classroom reader. The magazine was exotic; it looked like something adults would read. And, being in 3rd grade and nearing adulthood ourselves, we felt certain we should be reading more grown-up material. The magazine contained four pages and was titled “Keeping Up With Current Events (2nd/3rd Grade Edition).”

Here’s a modern version of a school news magazine, not unlike what we had 25 years ago

Each student took a turn reading one paragraph aloud until we finished the magazine, becoming well-versed in society’s vital issues in the process. The last page contained five questions which we answered on a separate sheet of lined paper using cursive handwriting and complete sentences. With the questions completed, we submitted our work and forgot the world existed outside our own ten-foot radius until two weeks later when the latest issue of “Current Events” arrived.

Then came the day when the cover of “Current Events” piqued my interest far beyond the bi-weekly novelty of reading a magazine in school. Apparently, the United States had a presidential election in the works. Being too young to remember the previous election four years prior, here was my introduction to presidential politics. Despite my ignorance, I knew this much: presidents were important. Inspired by the gravity of such an event, I decided it was high time I got involved.