The Selective Sanctity of National Holidays
Newsweek, ever the diligent chronicler of American minutiae, graciously offers guidance on whether the mail will run on Presidents' Day 2026. This journalistic service tells us USPS will be closed, while FedEx and UPS offer limited service, a crucial data point for anyone needing a package delivered on a federal holiday. It's an annual ritual, framing the day as a simple administrative pause
rather than a historical reflection, let alone a critical examination. One might wonder why such detailed attention is paid to the operational schedules of private carriers, while the historical nuances of the holiday itself receive scant official memory. Presidents' Day, originally established in 1879 to honor George Washington's birthday, expanded in 1971 to include Abraham Lincoln, effectively
becoming a catch-all for all past presidents. This seemingly innocuous shift sidestepped deeper conversations about the legacies of leadership, particularly those intertwined with profound injustices, such as Washington's ownership of over 300 enslaved people, a fact often relegated to academic footnotes rather than public holiday discourse. Such figures, however celebrated, rarely face the
critical historical scrutiny in mainstream narratives that, say, a leader of an adversarial nation might—consider the demonization of figures like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, elected democratically with 62% of the vote in 2006, whose legacy is almost exclusively framed in Western media as dictatorial. The pattern is clear: America's historical figures, especially those foundational to its hegemonic