Presidents’ Day 2025
Washington’s Birthday or Presidents Day: A few interesting facts about a very “shifty” holiday
When I was growing up in Indiana, we had two different presidential holidays – February 12th was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday and February 22nd was George Washington’s birthday – and schools were closed on both days, just 11 days apart in the middle of winter. It was often too cold or snowy to be outside on a day when we could legally play hookey and I remember thinking, as I got a bit older, that it was a darn shame that Lincoln and Washington hadn’t been born in, say, May or September.
Now, we have “Presidents’ Day” or “President’s Day” or “Presidents Day” in the United States, but the federal government still recognizes it as “Washington’s Birthday” and it has been an official federal holiday ever since 1879. After the United States Congress adopted the Uniform Monday Holiday Act in 1968 (a simpler time when Congress actually gave names to laws that matched up with their intended purpose), the federal government moved Washington’s Birthday from his actual birthday, February 22nd, to the third Monday of February each year, an action designed to provide federal workers with another three-day weekend.
It is doubtful our first American President, George Washington, would actually have cared all that much about the adjustment. Today, we say Washington was born on February 22, 1732, but on the day Augustine and Mary Washington’s infant son arrived in this world, the calendar hanging on the wall in their home in Westmoreland County, Virginia, said it was February 11, 1731. That was the date, according to the Julian calendar which was still in use in many parts of the world, including Great Britain’s colonies in North America. In 1752, when the future Father of his Country was 21 years old, Britain and all its colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar and that change abruptly shifted Washington’s birthday forward a year and 11 days.
Washington died in December of 1799, just two years after his eight-year tenure as the nation’s first chief executive ended, and in 1800 a grateful and nearly worshipful country began observing his birthday as an unofficial holiday honoring the nation’s revered first president. No other American president would engender such adoration until Abraham Lincoln and after the nation’s 16th president was assassinated in April 1865, just five days after leading the country through the almost unimaginable convulsion of the Civil War, the veneration of the martyred president led numerous states in the North to begin recognizing his birthday as a holiday as well. That being said, Lincoln’s birthday was never officially recognized as a federal holiday. After the states that had made up the Confederacy reentered the Union, their congressional representatives fiercely opposed and blocked any effort to grant national recognition to a man who was still loathed throughout the South. They were, however, willing to recognize a native son of Virginia. Admiration of Washington was something both the northern and southern states in the delicately reunited union could agree on and that’s how Congress made Washington’s birthday an official federal holiday in 1879, just 14 years after the Civil War ended.
Although Congress never officially recognized Lincoln’s birthday, the states that had fought to reunite the country under his leadership did respond by enacting state holidays in his honor. By 1940, 24 states and the District of Columbia had adopted February 12th as official state holidays – but the list did not include a single state south of the Mason-Dixon Line. That’s the reason why I had a day off from school growing up in Indiana at an age when I was still too young to know that I had four ancestors who had answered Lincoln’s call and volunteered to serve in the Union Army.
Unfortunately for the Great Emancipator, by 1968, Congress was under pressure from federal workers and the travel and leisure industry to create more opportunities for extended weekends and our federal legislature responded by passing the aforementioned Uniform Monday Holiday Act. This moved several federal holidays, including Washington’s Birthday, to Mondays starting in 1971 and effectively ended the separate observance of Lincoln’s birthday. Today, only five states, including California, still honor Honest Abe with a day off with pay for state employees.
On February 21, 1971, President Richard Nixon issued a proclamation purporting to rename Washington’s Birthday as “Presidents’ Day,” but that declaration has never been given the official imprimatur of congressional approval – and that has led to an odd little conumdrum. Forty-one of the 50 states have adopted legislation to recognize Washington’s Birthday as a state holiday as well – and in 10 of those states, it’s “Presidents’ Day” (plural possessive), in eight states, it’s “President’s Day” (singular possessive), in two states, it’s “Presidents Day” (plural) and in all the others, it’s something else, “Washington’s Birthday,” “Washington-Lincoln Day” and a variety of other combinations. For what it’s worth, the Associated Press Stylebook, followed by hundreds of newspapers nationwide, has dropped the apostrophe – Presidents Day.
Whatever you choose to call it, we hope you have found this little essay interesting and will enjoy your [fill in the blank] holiday – but should you need legal assistance from Aerlex, I’ll be in the office and answering the telephone that day – no disrespect intended to any of our 47 presidents.
Stephen Hofer and the Legal Team at Aerlex