America, are we getting screwed out a day off?

There is a local car dealership running ads on heavy rotation to promote their Presidents’ Day auto sales. I always thought that Presidents’ Day was about George Washington and Abe Lincoln, but I swear they are showing an image of Thomas Jefferson in their ads.

So either they are mistaken or I am, which led me to a search of the Internet. Good ol’ Snopes.com sheds some interesting light on the whole thing, link to the info below.

I’ll summarize what I’ve learned – there used to be a day for Washington and a day for Lincoln. Then somewhere along the way someone had the bright idea to combine them into one day. And I guess it was originally all about George, and Abe got tacked on at some point. That’s ok, Abe was a good dude.

So my takeaway from all this is that now instead of having two days off, I get one day off. Honestly, I’ll take it, February is a short month anyway. But still.

The other thing that is clear from this story is that these presidential holidays have been tinkered with, a lot. The dates keep changing, they get combined, they get separated, they combined again … there are federal days of observance but then each state can also have its own special days.

Why do we keep messing with this? Congress is busy.

http://www.snopes.com/holidays/presidents/presidentsday.asp

No clear ruling on whether it’s Presidents’ Day or President’s Day.

And, none of this has anything to do with Jefferson, thankyouverymuch.