America Needs More National Holidays
Americans deserve more breaks throughout the year
This week, Americans will celebrate our newest national holiday: Juneteenth, which commemorates the Union victory in the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. It’s also close enough to the summer solstice to serve as a de facto observance of that longest day of the year, much in the same way Christmas functions to mark the winter solstice. Many Americans—not least those in the nation’s capital, where I live—have already started to plan and take vacations around the new summer holiday.
As the rapid adoption and acceptance of the Juneteenth holiday illustrates, Americans could use more national holidays—ones that celebrate our achievements as a nation and give ordinary Americans some much-needed time off from our workaholic habits. Indeed, Americans work much more than many of their industrial world contemporaries, most notably Europeans. More national holidays would go a ways to giving Americans the breaks they deserve.
Here are some potential candidates for new national holidays:
D-Day (June 6): In the same way Juneteenth marks the Union victory over the Confederate slavocracy in our own Civil War, a national commemoration of D-Day would serve as a national celebration of America’s victory over fascism in World War II. With the last embers of the Greatest Generation now fading, the fight against tyranny deserves this sort of memorialization all the more. We saw it in the powerful, solemn ceremoniesconducted earlier this month to observe the eightieth anniversary of the Normandy landings and pay perhaps one last tribute to those remaining veterans of Operation Overlord, ceremonies that saw a moving exchangebetween Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and an wheelchair-bound American D-Day veteran.
But the memory of D-Day and its world-historical importance is already at risk of being lost in the United States, as can be seen in our politics each and every day. Soon enough the last of the Greatest Generation will be gone, and with them the import of what they did to save the world from the fascist menace will be consigned to the history books as well as movies and miniseries—or worse. For anyone under a certain age, the Second World War could become nothing more than a series of Call of Duty levels to blast through and kill time.
So it makes sense to formally enshrine D-Day as a national holiday, to remind ourselves and our posterity of the sacrifices made to defeat the evils of fascism in the middle of the twentieth century.
Moon Landing Day (July 20): The Apollo 11 Moon landing remains the epochal American and indeed human achievement of the twentieth century, and as such is certainly worthy of an annual commemoration. A holiday to celebrate the Moon landing would mark the date in 1969 when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on another world. But it would also serve as a way to celebrate America’s space program in its entirety and, more broadly, America’s achievements in science, technology and engineering throughout history—from the Erie Canal and transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century to the International Space Station and mRNA vaccines in the twenty-first.
As with the last veterans of D-Day, the last Moon walkers are passing on—and so too with them the memories of the Apollo era will fade over time. While hopefully American astronauts will return to the surface of the Moon in the near future with the Artemis Program, there’s a need to solidify and fix the memory of Apollo in our national consciousness so it lasts beyond the life of the last living Moon walker. If there’s any proof needed that America can do great things on behalf of all humanity, to serve as the vanguard for the expansion of human knowledge and understanding, Apollo is it.
The crowds that came out to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 back in 2019 testify to the potential such a holiday holds. If nothing else, it’s an opportunity for Americans to take a day off in the middle of summer, spend time outdoors, and look up at the night sky with wonder.
Spring and Fall Equinoxes (March 20 and September 21, or thereabouts): With Juneteenth and Christmas, America already has de facto holidays to cover the longest and shortest days of the year: the summer and winter solstices. Why not mark the two other major turnings of the seasons, the spring and fall equinoxes? Nowruz, the traditional Persian new year, falls on the spring equinox; Easter, with its variable date, doesn’t always land close to the equinox. Meanwhile, Labor Day comes several weeks too early to stand in for the fall equinox, while Columbus Day comes a couple weeks too late. More to the point, though, Americans ought to be able to take time off to mark the change of the seasons and the passage of time they represent in ways beyond, say, spring break.
These holidays are just suggestions, meant to give a sense of what sorts of events and occasions America could celebrate and commemorate—ones that either observe annual changes or reinforce and call attention to the best chapters of our history. Either way, a few more days off each year won’t hurt us—and could actually help by reminding Americans what they have in common.