When A Holiday Is NOT A Holiday

Here are some questions to ponder.

When is a car NOT a car? Answer: When it turns into a driveway.

When is a Holiday NOT a Holiday?

You would think that it is great to have a holiday and perhaps get off work, or celebrate some event, however there are some holidays not observed.

When I worked for a large computer company, they had a very full holiday schedule. Being an International company some offices had various holidays and you never knew if a certain office would be open. I remember a New England office would be closed for a local holiday. While not a holiday per se, there was one city where the offices were closed on Sunday and the company could be fined if you were found inside on Sunday.

So as I say, we had holidays and what we called Flex Time. This was in lieu of sick time or vacation time. You could use it for what ever you wanted. The problem was that the Government kept coming up with new holidays that the company had to pay employees for. I think their current list of days off was quite liberal but then there was Martin Luther King Day added to the list. The company had no problem with that being a holiday (although I am sure that some companies might have). It was just the issue of yet another paid holiday. The company knew that this trend of adding holidays was not going to stop, so they created a FLOATING HOLIDAY that you could use for whatever holiday or celebration you wanted, be it MLK Day, St Patrick’s Day or even Thing About What You Can Replace With Plastics Day. The employees didn’t mind as it solved the problem of them wanting another holiday but being able to choose it. Then again the company was correct and I see there is yet another holiday added called JuneTeenth National Independence Day.

It is not just various companys that choose which holiday to celebrate. Let’s look at Hawaii.

Here is Hawaii we celebrate a number of cultural events. There is King Kamehameha Day. ng Kamehameha I Day is a public holiday in the U.S. state of Hawaii. It honors Kamehameha the Great, the monarch who first established the unified Kingdom of Hawaiʻi—comprising the Hawaiian Islands of Niʻihau, Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, Lānaʻi, Kahoʻolawe, Maui, and Hawaiʻi. You may not have heard of King Kamehameha, but his statue is in the National Statuary Hall in D.C.. We have Prince Kuhio Day and of course Pearl Harbor Day.

So, is there a holiday that we here do not celebrate? Yes, the holiday termed Columbus Day is not a state holiday in Hawaii. Oh the post office is closed because it is a national holiday, but we don’t celebrate Columbus. He never visited Hawaii. We were ‘supposedly’ discovered by Captain Cook but as we know (as well as mainlanders know) that both the U.S. and Hawaii had indigenous people there long before some foreigner discovered the place. Most anthropologists believe that the original settlement of Hawaii was by Polynesians who migrated northwest from the Marquesas Islands between the 4th and 7th centuries ce, to be followed by a second wave of immigrants that sailed from Tahiti during the 9th or 10th century. So the Hawaiians discovered the land at least 1,000 years before Captain Cook arrived on the scene.

What Hawaii celebrates is Discover’s Day and it is better described here than I can. So read up and understand that not all holidays are celebrations.