In the United States,
Christmas is the last official holiday of the calendar-year, and Thanksgiving
is the penultimate holiday. New Year’s Day is the first holiday of the year.
Any other holidays among or between these are private rather than public
holidays, and thus the public is not obliged to recognize those holidays as if
they were equivalent to public holidays. Although New Year’s Day has remained
safe from ideological attack, neither Thanksgiving nor Christmas have.
Nevertheless, their status as official U.S. holidays has remained, at least as
of 2025, and thus it remains as of then at least proper and fitting for
Americans to refer to those holidays by name rather than by the denialist,
passive-aggressive expression, happy holidays, which conveniently
disappears even from retail clerks just in time for New Year’s because that
holiday is ideologically permissible. The problem writ large is the influx of
ideology trying to invalidate certain official United States holidays. By
the end of 2025, the initial influx had triggered a counter-influx that is just
as ideological, and thus only encircling certain (but not all) official
holidays with ideology. The underlying fault lies in using the creation of a
holiday to promote an ideology.
Martin Luther King Day and
Juneteenth were made official U.S. holidays to promote an ideology. This
rationale for declaring a public holiday is problematic because such holidays
should be acceptable beyond a partisan minority or even a simple majority of the
public. This translates into requiring that both major parties agree (even
beyond simple majorities) in Congress before a new holiday is declared.
With regard to existing
official holidays that have long been on the books, the onus should be on
efforts to remove those holidays because ideologically-oriented motives for
change, being partisan, warrant strict scrutiny, whereas the holidays’ default
status does not. In short ideologically-motivated change should be
subject to heightened scrutiny because ideologies are typically partisan rather
than a matter of unanimity.
That Martin Luther King Day
and Juneteenth are arguably too duplicative or overlapping, thus contributing
to there being too many public holidays at the expense of the Gross Domestic
Product and thus prosperity (and employment), is an indication that both
holidays came out of an ideological push rather than a national sense or
identity. In other words, the excess alone is a sign that holiday-making had
gotten out of hand. In 2025, U.S. President Trump argued that there had come to
be “too many non-working holidays,” and that all the days off were costing the
U.S. economy too much in lost productivity.[1]
Doing ideology by creating holidays does not come cost-free in economic terms. If
the selfish trend of making holidays in one’s own image continues, more and
more holidays might be viewed as valid only by some, rather than by every
American, as being an official U.S. holiday were not validating enough. This
does not mean that every American must or should celebrate every holiday.
The trend can also be seen in
the changes made to holidays on which fees are waived in national parks.
Firstly, that the “Trump administration removed Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth
from [the 2026] schedule of free entrance days for national parks” indicates
that those two holidays are ideological, and thus partisan, in nature, and thus
not fit to be public holidays.[2]
Secondly, that the federal president then added his own birthday to the list of
free-entrance days shows just how egocentric and thus arbitrary (to other
people) holiday-creation had become. Trump also removed the birthday of the
Bureau of Land Management, which could be a reflection of the president’s ideological
dislike of regulatory agencies. Why not remove the first day of National Park
Week, Great American Outdoors Day and National Public Lands Day too, as being
excessive losses of revenue, given that none of those constitute even minor
holidays like MLK Day, Veterans Day, and Juneteenth. Removing non-fee days such
as Great American Outdoors Day would make sense from a financial standpoint,
especially given Trump’s addition of President Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday
and the Fourth of July, which make more sense anyway, given all that Roosevelt
did for the national parks and the major status of Independence Day in terms of
anything governmental in the United States.
The president’s fiddling with
the fee-free days at national parks goes to show that the questionable ideologically-based
rationale of holiday-creation may seem to go seamlessly along with more
legitimate, and credible from a national standpoint, rationales. So, the
interlarding of the former can easily go unnoticed and only objected to after too
many holidays have been added to the calendar. That conservatives were joining in
the game of ideological holiday taking-and-giving has effectively relativized, or
flagged, what the progressive had been doing in creating new national holidays
and even in trying to outlaw Christmas, a national holiday, be castigating any
mention of that major public holiday by name.
The addition of a
counter-force could thus be efficacious if the objective is to sever
holiday-construction from the tool-kit of partisan ideology. That politicalizing
had already gone too far with neither realization from the public at large nor
any self-restraint by the expansionist ideologues themselves is itself a
problem worthy of notice and correction. Successfully adding or ending a
national holiday should receive the consent of the vast (super) majority of
Americans at the very least, including both of their major political parties
rather than just one with a minority of the other. Opposing partisan ideologies
can be fought over on the campaign trail and at the ballot box rather than by using
holidays, which, incidentally, can serve as respites from all the political
turmoil. Treating holidays as political means rather than as ends in
themselves, including what they stand for, has gone virtually unnoticed by
Americans and their elected representatives. This takes a gradual and subtle
yet important toll on the very notion of a public, official holiday, such that
even the major holidays are subject to attack for ideological purposes. It is
important to realize that any ideology is partial rather than wholistic
because some values are emphasized more than others.
The guts that it took to risk
treason by declaring British colonies to be sovereign countries, and President
Lincoln’s benevolent declaration of one day to give thanks came under attack in
the early twenty-first century because American history is not salubrious with
respect to American Blacks and Indians, and counter-holidays, partisan in
nature, were created, whether public or private holidays (as if the two were
the same). As a result, nearly every
national holiday could be viewed as being valid only for people of a certain
ideology on one side or the other, rather than as what a public or national
holiday should be. The vacuous, ideological expression in “wishing” someone, “Happy
holidays” is just one symptom of the underlying societal illness. Such a “greeting”
fits with Nietzsche’s point that modern morality has been wielded like a club
under the subterfuge of good-will. In other words, “Happy holidays” contains a
virulent “Thou shalt not!” Unfortunately,
the very notion of an official national holiday has become collateral damage for
a people grown wary of too much ideological push. Is there any respite? At one
time, holidays afforded such a rest. Put simply, spending weeks arguing
directly or by verbal passive-aggression about a galvanized holiday is counter-productive
from the standpoint of enjoying a day off work to relax and have fun. The
tyranny of an ideological minority can be just as bad as that of the majority;
holidays—July 4th at the very least, should be tyranny-free.
2. Ibid.
