Take on the President

Sometimes a holiday just seems to appear out of thin air, one year it's just a day on the calendar and the next the entire city is shut down. I guess I knew some people had it off but it never seemed like a 'real' holiday to me just a chance to 'honor' the forefathers by offering 15% off appliances or a chance to own a brand-new Ford Taurus in maroon. Throughout the last week I spoke with friends in banking, lawyering, softwaring and insurancing and they all had off while I spoke to people in manufacturing, retailing, door-manning and cleaning and they would all be at work. The USPS is off but UPS works, the banks are closed but stores are open.
My problem is that either make it a real holiday where everybody is off or you don't
I like holidays and understand ones to honor people or events but I don't like manufactured ones. As a country we shut down for Presidents Day but we work on 9/11. Many people get Columbus Day off but many work on Martin Luther King Day now explain that to me. Of by the way we don't even shut down on Washington's actual birthday, we just shut down on the nearest Monday. I don't quite understand the logic behind any of it, except probably where the day falls on the calendar. Many offices are open on Martin Luther King Day which is right after people had long Christmas Breaks while Presidents day falls in the heart of a dreary February.
But the reasoning is more dubious than that, it's about retail stores. It's the Federal Government fabricating a holiday to get people to shop for a new air-conditioner or a new fridge, it has nothing to do with Colonel Washington fighting the Brits or Lincoln freeing the slave. . Just look at the paper today, there will be caricatures drawn of the presidents under banners for '0% financing for the first 6 months' at Raymour and Flannigan but almost zero lip-service to the actual honorees in the 'actual' paper.
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