Legal Holidays

Maybe a lesson in working for change is among Labor Day's messages to modern America. Change is slow and uneven, so take a long view. We seem to need a crisis, or even crises, to move change along.

For food, for raiment, For life, for opportunity, For friendship and fellowship, We thank Thee, O Lord. (The Philmont Grace) My four summers on the...

Humans are sometimes too legal. When we focus on what the law requires, we can lose sight of what is right. Legal holidays become required holidays. Required becomes entitled. Entitled doesn't ask why.

Since there is no official Presidents Day federal holiday, it is impossible to tell if Presidents Day refers to Washington and Lincoln, or if it is meant to include all of our Presidents.

More than any of the other legal holidays, this one challenges us. First, we were challenged to establish it. Now we return to a more fundamental challenge: Are we who we say we are?

America pauses today, if but for a moment, in collective recognition that despite our differences and our problems, we have many reasons to be grateful. Law, thankfully, has little to do with Thanksgiving.

There are ten federal holidays and this one is the dud. New Year's Day has no story or compelling national interest behind its status as a legal holiday.

Columbus Day can be an Americas day, plural not possessive, and can honor the original peoples of the hemisphere as it reminds us, its current peoples, that we share more than a land mass, we share a future.

I started blogging about our country's "legal" holidays out of concern that, for many, these days were just another day off. Well, it turns out that the Christmas federal holiday is actually just that, legally at least.