It’s October 12^th. We used to call it “Columbus” Day and, for some (but not all) it was a holiday. For me, it’s always been confusing.

When I was a schoolgirl in Alameda, California, Columbus Day was ‘celebrated’… but at school, as usual. In my try-to-stay-within-the-line years, we carefully colored pictures of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria. We learned to say, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue, In fourteen hundred ninety-two.” We did not learn until we were older that schools in San Francisco, just across the bay from us, were closed that day and kids had the day off.

That was also true twenty years hence when I was teaching in Hayward, another community in which schools were open October 12^th but banks and post offices were not. By then, I knew that the party line was that “San Francisco has a large Italian population so Columbus Day is an official holiday.” I had the audacity to ask, “In that case, why isn’t Cinco de Mayo a holiday in Hayward Unified School District? We have lots of Mexican-American kids.” Maybe it is a school holiday these days; I haven’t kept up.)

Here and now in the Ocean Beach School District, Columbus Day is listed on the 2015 School Calendar as a “Non-student Work Day.” In other words, teachers are hard at it, as usual; Kids are off, presumably celebrating the holiday that is now called by a variety of politically correct names – “Native American Day” or “Indigenous People’s Day,” for example. And, much attention is apparently paid to dispel any myths about Columbus thinking that the world was flat or that he “discovered” the “New World.”

It was a lot easier when we were just coloring those sailing ships and learning simple rhymes and didn’t know it was a holiday for some and not for others. It was probably a lot easier when the world was still flat, too.