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.” (more…)
Brohemia 