Maybe it’s just me, but I think that when most of the federal holidays were changed to Mondays, they lost some on their rai·son d’ê·tre. Today is a great example. According to timeanddate.com:
In 1968, shortly after Martin Luther King died, a campaign was started for his birthday to become a holiday to honor him. After the first bill was introduced, trade unions lead the campaign for the federal holiday. It was endorsed in 1976… Martin Luther King Day was first observed in 1986, although it was not observed in all states until the year 2000.
It is the last of our eleven federal holidays to be established and the only one that was designated after the Uniform Public Holiday Act was passed in 1968. Until that time, we honored most Federal holidays on specific dates – no matter which day of the week it was from one year to another. It always seemed to make more sense to me. To my way of thinking, it would be more meaningful to connect January 15th to Martin Luther King because that was his birthday — not whichever date turns out to be the third Monday in January.
Those Mondays seem impersonal to me. They don’t much inspire a desire to learn more about the man or the boy for whom January 15th, for instance, was always a special day – not the third Monday in January for heaven’s sake! And besides which, the third Monday in January is widely referred to as Blue Monday – the day when seasonal affective disorder and general winter blahs may be at their peak – or so I read on another online site, ctvnews.com.
That article went on to say: Despite catching the popular imagination, Blue Monday has little to no scientific backing. It was conceived in 2005 by self-described “psychologist, life coach and happiness consultant” Cliff Arnall at the request of a British travel company. Arnall claimed to have used a mathematical equation to find the saddest day of the year, albeit with one major caveat. His calculations were based on Northern Hemisphere weather data, allowing the travel agency to suggest that taking a trip south of the equator was the only surefire path to mid-January bliss.
Yep… just another money-making ploy. Which somehow I think is probably true of all federal holidays – at least the Monday ones. Judge for yourself! Here’s the 2019 list:
New Year’s Day, Tuesday, January 1
Inauguration Day, Every Four Years, January 20
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Monday, January 21
George Washington’s Birthday (incorrectly called by some “Presidents’ Day”), Monday, February 18
Memorial Day, Monday, May 27
Independence Day, Thursday, July 4
Labor Day, Monday, September 2
Columbus Day, Monday, October 14
Veteran’s Day, Monday, November 11
Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 28
Christmas, Wednesday, December 25
So, Happy MLK Day and Happy Shopping! Or am I being too cynical? (And how many of you remember the original holiday dates for some of those Mondays???)
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