D.C. Diary: Presidents' / Presidents / President's Day

Today is Presidents' Day, a public holiday in the US. This is obviously great because we all get a day off, but has been causing me some consternation grammatically. The more I read about the forthcoming holiday in the papers, the more I was becoming concerned by the lack of consistency: was it Presidents Day, Presidents' Day or President's Day? I decided to delve a little deeper.

Apparently, the day can be referred to as Presidents Day or Presidents' Day, it being a public holiday to commemorate the great office of state and all those that have held the title. However, the date also marks the anniversary of George Washington's birthday, he being of course the first to hold the grand seat of power, and therefore, can also be referred to as President's Day. It is always held on the third Monday in February, the date closest to Washington's birthday. Easy. Or so I thought...

It turns out that in recent times, George Washington Day was renamed Presidents’ Day in order to celebrate not just the birthday of George Washington (Feb 22) but also that of Lincoln (Feb 12). However, in Virginia, Washington’s home state, the people clearly weren’t going to stand for that and thus continue to celebrate today as ‘George Washington Day’. In Connecticut it appears that officials couldn’t make up their minds so have declared two holidays in February – one on Lincoln’s birthday and the other today. Confusingly, Alabama celebrates the day as ‘Washington and Jefferson Day’ (even though Jefferson’s birthday was in April and he was born and died in Virginia). Massachusetts has the best rules: today's holiday honours all the presidents that have come from Massachusetts – John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Calvin Coolidge and JFK (except George Bush Senior who, although born there, spent most of his life elsewhere - brilliant excuse for omitting him from the list). Anyway, all very confusing but, in short, it seems that most states now use the holiday to celebrate all presidents.

Of course, I suspect the average American pays very little attention to any of this: Presidents Day has actually become known as ‘a great weekend for sales, especially on cars’.

In order to celebrate Mr. Washington's birthday, Simon and I went away to Shenandoah National Park for the weekend. Shenandoah is a beautiful area of Northern Virginia, about 70 miles from Washington, and we stayed in a little cabin with a hot tub in the middle of some woods. Beautiful. It was a lovely crisp day and we walked up to Kennedy's Peak this morning. It was a three hour walk and we only saw two other people the whole morning. I guess everyone else was at the car sales. George Washington would be proud.