Today some of us are gonna get a day off to celebrate something called "Presidents Day." I've done an extensive search and have been unable to find which of our presidents, if any, were actually born on this date. Maybe my computer is broken or something. When I worked for a living, we depended on an entire IT Department to make sure nothing worked so I can't really say much about the way the blooming thing is functioning. I just don't know. Anyway, it used to be Washington's Birthday that we celebrated but all that got changed.
In 1800AD Mason Locke Weems made up a tale about George Washington chopping down a cherry tree in an effort to sell more of his books. He correctly imagined such a story would enchant a nation and make more people buy the book he wrote. Eighty years later, the wonderful, hard working congressmen of the time wanted another day off so they declared the date of George Washington's birth, the twenty-second of February, to be a holiday for all the overworked people in the District of Columbia.
Now ya know this kinda situation will never work, not then and not now. If some Federal employees get the day off, the rest of them want it off too. So, five years later ALL the Feds started taking the day off. This happy state of affairs worked for over seventy-five years but you know how people are. Give 'em an inch and pretty soon they want to eat their cake too. Is that the way that saying goes? I'm claiming senility if I got it mixed up.
In the sixties congress had a bright idea. Since there were four holidays that were sort of disorderly, sometimes falling at the front or end of the week and sometimes falling in the middle, why not make them all fall on a Monday? That's what they did and it think it's the first time I can actually point to, in my lifetime, that congress showed itself not only able, but also willing to rewrite history. We all know George Washington was born on a Tuesday but congress says it happened on Monday! The whole world knows Chris Columbus first looked upon the New World on a Friday morning but our hero's in Washington said he did it on a Monday. They did get Veterans Day right, that really did occur on a Monday, and it was impossible to screw up Memorial Day. That poor orphan holiday bounced all over the place, anytime between the first of May and the first of June for a hundred years or so.
The American public was a little touchy back the the sixties and were not in any mood to have congress mix up all their holidays like it had mixed and messed up the rest of their lives. So, congress made darn sure none of what they did would take effect until 1971. By then most of them had found places to hide just in case. Even so, everybody still got upset about Veterans Day and in 1975 it got pulled from the list and went back to the way it was.
Now I believe that old Mr. Weems was onto something, and was way ahead of his time. Just look at the newspapers on Presidents Day. You won't find a lot of stuff about our presidents, but boy will you find a bunch of junk on sale! Instead of trying to buy all that crap, why not just take the day and rest a little. You know you deserve it.
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