Post-192: George Washington Day

Today is the holiday commonly known as “Presidents’ Day” (a confusing holiday). I still go in to “work”.

A funny thing about Presidents’ Day is that more than one presidential birthday is being celebrated, i.e. Washington’s (Feb. 22) and Lincoln’s (Feb. 12) — formerly two separate holidays in many states.

However, states have all different names for this day, including the formerly-Southern state of Virginia. (Formerly because in the mid-2010s here, with Northern Virginia’s millions of people, Virginia is tipping into being something else.)

Virginia calls it “George Washington Day”, excluding old Honest Abe.

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Virginia also celebrates “Lee-Jackson Day” (two Confederate generals), instead of “Martin Luther King Jr. Day”.

That was a Richmond decision, though. Typical Northern Virginians of the 2010s here would cringe at “Lee-Jackson Day”. I remember when I was at college in Northern Virginia, the local college authorities had to decide to give only one Monday off in the spring semester and axe the other: MLK Day or Presidents’ Day (i.e., “George Washington Day”). They decided to retain MLK Day and have classes as-normal on Presidents’ Day. (I remember Arlington Public Schools similarly refusing to touch MLK Day when snow-days called for one holiday to be cancelled.) The move by the college prompted a professor of Geography, one of my favorites, a part-AmericanIndian from Oklahoma, to criticize their PC decision: If you’re deciding who is more important to the history of the USA, how can MLK possibly take precedence over George Washington?