Recently in America, we celebrated Labor Day. Whoa, I hear you say, why don’t you celebrate Labor Day on May 1st, like most everybody else in the world?! It’s because of our 3-day weekends.
Firstly, we Americans don’t celebrate any holiday on the first day of a month as a general rule. Except for New Years Day, which is also the first day of the year, so it gets an exception.
Secondly, May Day is a Communist holiday. Americans don’t celebrate Communist holidays. Moreover, our Labor Day is not celebrating Laborers (which might encourage Communism), but the act of Labor itself. It’s the effort that we commemorate. Work will set us free. Labor is the Truth. That’s why they call it Puritanical.
We used to talk about the “working man” in America. But men aren’t politically correct, and “working person” sounds too impersonal. Instead we talk about American Consumers. Somebody has to get rid of everything our work is producing. We don’t even talk about American Citizens any more. But that’s OK because we do talk about US Stockholders. Sometimes.
So Labor Day celebrates work. In fact, most US holidays do that. Good old American Ingenuity has placed most holidays on a Monday. Instead of celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday on his birthday, we celebrate on the 3rd Monday in January. His birthday will actually occur there every 7 years or so.
The ingenious part is that we don’t get holidays on Friday. That would be too much like leaving work early for the week. Instead, we take off Monday, and end up coming in late for work. This encourages us make up our lost time by working extra hard on Tuesday and Wednesday. By Thursday we’re as tired as we usually are on Friday. The Friday after a 3-day weekend is like working overtime on Saturday, except you’re not getting time-and-a-half.
But here is the kicker, the final twist of the knife. On a normal work-week, it’s 1/2 over at noon on Wednesday. On a holiday week, the work-week isn’t 1/2 over till the end of business on Wednesday, 1/2 a day later than usual. The week after a holiday seems longer on purpose.
It’s psychological warfare against the communists!