It’s amazing how widespread the phrase ‘President’s Day’ has become- virtually all of the ‘holiday closings’ listings online say that the Post Office will be closed on Monday because of the President’s Day holiday. Well, it just ain’t so. As Hendrick Hertzberg points out in this week’s New Yorker, the name of the federal holiday is, and always has been, Washington’s Birthday. The official USPS holiday closing sign gets it right- it says ‘Washington’s Birthday’, but it does acknowledge the popular confusion by tacking on ‘(Presidents’ Day)’ in smaller print.

There’s an interesting history of the holiday, and the whole Monday holiday controversy at Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives.

Update: based on the comments on the main web page, there are apparently still people who believe that we once had two federal holidays in February, one for Lincoln, and one for Washington, and that the ‘President’s Day’ holiday took their place. Not so- Lincoln’s Birthday has never been an annual federal holiday. See Wikipedia or Snopes.

Update2: This one’s worth an entry of its own- the Manchester Union Leader actually thinks there is a War on Washington’s Birthday!?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 17th, 2007 at 9:44 am and is filed under postal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.