National holidays make complete and perfect sense if you grew up with them, and no sense at all if you didn’t. It’s difficult for anyone not brought up in America to get excited about Thanksgiving, for example, as Americans find it hard to work up much enthusiasm for Bastille Day in France, Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, or the Foundation of the Workers’ Party Day in North Korea.
These special holidays make a tremendous impression on us in childhood. All the adults take them so seriously that the public holidays seem like part of the fabric of the universe itself. They march us through the year as relentlessly as the seasons: Martin Luther King Day, Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, and Thanksgiving – all commemorating some more or less mythical part of the national history. On these days we celebrate ourselves, and people like us.
But, for most people like us, it’s not the history lesson that counts but the extra day off work. With the notable exception of Thanksgiving, these festivals are observed on Mondays regardless of the exact date they are meant to commemorate. This convenient fiction gives us a much-needed long weekend. The cunning placement of Thanksgiving on a Thursday allows us to steal four whole days. This adds up to seven official secular holidays a year, or eight if we include Christmas, which has become a kind of non-denominational winter solstice shopping ritual.
It’s not enough. Other nations have many more holidays. Russia has nine, France has thirteen and Japan has seventeen, not even counting religious festivals. Only Albania has fewer national holidays than the USA. As the world superpower, we should surely have more long weekends than anybody else.
Only Congress can declare national holidays and they have fallen down on the job, as on so many others. We need at the very least one three-day weekend per month. There’s a big gap in March and April, and nothing at all in June or in August. A few more long weekends would be good for our health and good for the tourist industry.
There are already plenty of special days that should be holidays but aren’t – Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day are obvious choices, and of course Election Day so everyone would have time to vote. Tax Day, April 15, should certainly be a national holiday, we deserve it, and the holiday deficit in August could be nicely filled by upgrading National Relaxation Day, which falls on August 15. We badly need that. The British have Boxing Day, December 26, as a day of healing and recovery after all the other holidays, and we could use that too.
A few brand new holidays would also be refreshing, and they should celebrate the genius of science and technology – the inventions that make life in the twenty-first century so much better than it ever was before. What about a Central Heating Day, FM Radio Day, Medical Anesthesia Day, Dishwasher Day, Prozac Day? If these were all declared to be official national holidays, we would have fifteen long weekends in the year, two more than the French, and almost as many as the Japanese. That would be a national distinction worth boasting about.
Copyright: David Bouchier
