Holidays at U.S. Parks: Usurped by Partisan Ideology

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 4^th at the very least, should be tyranny-free.

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1. Pocharapon Neammanee, “Trump’s Birthday Added to National Park Free-Entry Days After Dropping MLK Day and Juneteenth,” The Huffington Post, December 6, 2025.
2. Ibid.

Enjoy Your Holiday: On the Weaponization of Kindness

 In Europe, the word holiday can refer to what in America is called a vacation, which of course can occur whether or not the vacation falls on a national holiday. Regarding the latter, the official designation of a holiday by a government renders the holiday valid anywhere in the country’s territory. This does not mean that very resident or even citizen is duty-bound to pay any attention to a given national holiday, but deciding not to celebrating a holiday does not thereby mean that it is not legitimate and thus valid. Deliberately acting out from the instinctual urge of passive aggression by refusing even to say the name of a national holiday in public discourse, as if a personal decision not to celebrate a national holiday eviscerates it on the national calendar can be viewed as a case of hyperextended projection from a personal dislike to the personal desire to cancel the national holiday, as if a personal dislike could nullify a national law or proclamation. Behind the passive aggression is none other than selfishness, which implies loving oneself over loving God. Theological (rather than psychological) self-love renders the world as a projection of the self, including its narrowly circumscribed (to private benefits only) interests. Hence, the unrestrained ego leaps from its own dislike to being entitled to unilaterally, as a private actor, nullify an officially designated national holiday as null and void. I contend that Nietzsche’s philosophy can shed some light on this modern phenomenon concerning Christmas, an official U.S. holiday. Kindness as actually passive aggression is tailor-made for Nietzsche’s eviscerating scalpel, which he wielded to expose the power-aggrandizement being exercised under the disguise of the moral injunction of Thou Shalt Not! 

The full essay is at "Enjoy Your Holiday."

Christmas: A U.S. National Holiday Privatized by Logical Fallacy and Passive Aggression

On December 18, 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order, the first section of which states, “All executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government shall be closed and their employees excused from duty on Monday, December 24, 2018, the day before Christmas Day.” Christmas itself had not been an official federal holiday until an Act of Congress was signed by President Ulysses S. Grant in June, 1870. That Act also declared New Year’s Day and the 4^th of July would be national holidays too, and yet by the 21^st century a significant number of Americans, and especially business managers, were committing a gaping category mistake by treating Christmas as not commensurate with the other two holidays as public holidays. By Christmas in 2018, the self-ingratiating “mistake” was still not transparent. Hence, this essay.

On the federal holiday of Christmas Eve Day before Christmas of 2018, I went grocery shopping at a Bashas’ supermarket. Waiting in the cashier line, an elderly woman at the front and I confronted the cashier, who refused to name the two-day holiday by name. What was behind this rather obvious fit of passive aggression? After the cashier felt the need to inform us that his holiday had been two weeks earlier, I countered that a vital difference exists between private and public holidays. My birthday is a personal holiday to me, and yours is to you, but neither of us would presume that our individual holidays are commensurate with a public holiday; we would not expect and even insist that other people recognize our respective birthdays as holidays. We would not say to strangers, “Happy holiday.” Yet in replying, “My holiday was two weeks ago,” the cashier was treating Christmas, a public, national holiday, as if it too were the private holiday of some people. Herein lies the category mistake! Factually, a public holiday is not a private holiday, so a person errs in putting them into the same category.
Let's pretend that I shop at a Bashas at the end of June, and the cashier facing me says, "Happy Fourth of July!" I reply, "I hope you enjoy your holiday; my holiday was a week ago." I could have been referring to the Summer Solstice, for instance. My holiday is not commensurate with a national holiday, so my use of your and my would be inaccurate, and, frankly, insulting to the public holiday and the people who celebrate it, for it makes no difference to a public holiday how many people celebrate it. The holiday is still a national holiday. The subterranean "game players" either don't understand this, or they reject it without a sound rationale. My response to Independence Day would doubtless be considered very strange; it would also be strange were the cashier to go out of his way to refuse, like a stubborn child, just to say the name of the public holiday (i.e., Independence Day, or "July 4th"). Even so, these dynamics, or games, around Christmastime are accepted as valid on the strange assumption that just because some people might be offended, it is an affront just to with people in public a Merry Christmas. Put another way, the societal dysfunction, which had even become institutionalized thanks to American retailers, has faced a considerable blind-spot (or state of denial). This would not have been the case for Independence Day and New Year's Day in spite of the fact that these two holidays had been made legal public holidays in the same Act of Congress in which Christmas Day was included! 
Lest I be pronounced an ardent rationalist like Kant, who argued that logical contradiction in a maxim being universalized means it is unethical, I supplement my displeasure at the category mistakes with Nietzsche's theory in order to drill deeper, or diagnose the underlying weakness, or sickness. To whit, I submit that resentment and even jealousy, which are manifestations of weakness, are behind the warping of logic. 
To Nietzsche, the weak resent and are jealous of the strong simply because the weak lack it while the strong have a surplus. So the self-confident strong, who are (unlike me) not bothered by the pestilence of the weak not only because it is not a threat, but also because strength resides in itself even as it's benefits overflow to the fishing boats below. “What are those parasites to me!,” the strong say, for the latter are awash in their own strength, which the parasites cannot capture except through “moral” Thou Shalt Nots. This is why Nietzsche was so critical of modern morality; it can be, and has, been used like a club to gain power over the beguiled strong. Ironically, the weak who seek to dominate easily resort to cruelty, whereas the strong have enough of the pleasure of power, especially in mastering a stubborn instinctual urge. 

Speaking to a Bashas’ manager briefly on my way out of the store, I said that the cashier had been rude to another customer and myself by stubbornly staying with the claim that this one national holiday, Christmas, is, in his view, merely a private holiday like his own, thus below New Year’s Day and Independence Day. 

Perhaps part of the explanation of the warping of logic is simply ignorance of the U.S. Constitution, whose first amendment stipulates that the federal government cannot act to establish a religion. Even favoring a religious holiday is out of bounds for the federal (and state) government. So the Act of Congress signed by President Grant must have a non-religious basis; hence, the public holiday of Christmas has survived constitutionally to join Thanksgiving (signed by Lincoln not much before Grant’s Act) and the two other holidays of Grant’s Act as an official public, or national, holiday. So liking Christmas only as akin to the private holidays or individuals or associations thereof cannot merely be a matter of religious jealousy (out of some erroneous sense of equivalence on religious grounds). In other words, the claim that my (personal or associational) religious holiday is equivalent to yours even though yours is associated with a public holiday of the same name is erroneous. Beyond the logic lies resentment and jealousy, which are misplaced.
So saying “Happy Holiday” only for Christmas—a slogan whose passive aggressive core is masked by considerateness in not wanting to offend—is not justified by even the seemingly salubrious mask because the practice has not, at least by 2019, extended to the other public holidays in the United States in spite of the fact that some American Indians may be offended by Thanksgiving greetings, anarchists and other political protesters may be offended by “Happy Fourth of July!” and Quakers and other non-violence groups may be offended by Veterans Day, which is a major public holiday in Arizona. In other words, why is offence so significant only in the case of Christmas?  Because it is an official national holiday in the U.S., and thus a public holiday, Americans are not even ethically bound to omit entire mention of it even on it’s eve just because offence may be taken. The same applies to the other national holidays. My question is the following: why did so many Americans, and virtually all retail businesses, capitulated to Thou shalt not! of the resentful, irrational weak who seek to dominate even the strong. Nietzsche contends that the strong have enough mental strength to overcome their most intractable instinctual urges by mastering rather than repressing them. The weak, in contrast, cannot resist acting on the urge to dominate (even to be cruel if necessary!) even the strong, as if weakness were strength too. Both the cashier and the manager, who, by the way, merely gave me a diplomatic look evinced weakness; without sufficient power internally to change and liking their Thou Shalt Nots, they would no doubt continue even after having their category mistakes revealed. 
Would the American public too simply go on as herd animals once transparency is make possible? Or would Americans, as strong individuals, not be beguiled by mistakened, passive-aggressive false-narratives such as “Christmas is just a religious holiday, and thus equivalent to private religious holy-days, so Christmas is not really a public holiday”?

See On the Arrogance of False Entitlement, available at Amazon. The book applies Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy to business managers and business ethicists.

Thanksgiving Elipsed by Christmas: Will the Offending Businesses Go Extinct?

Even as the business-sourced encroachment of Christmas had all but eclipsed the American holiday of Thanksgiving in 2013 on account of the day falling so late in November (as if four weeks were somehow not a long enough time for gift-buying), the on-going trend (or stampede) of stores opening earlier and earlier on Thanksgiving puts the holiday itself in the cross-hairs of the retail rifles. Thanksgiving may one day be essentially extinct, and, ironically, so too might be the usual suspects--the enterprises themselves.
The New York Times reported in mid-November 2011, “Major chains like Target, Macy’s, Best Buy and Kohl’s say they will open for the first time at midnight on Thanksgiving, and Wal-Mart will go even further, with a 10 p.m. Thanksgiving start for deals on some merchandise. . . . To be at or near the front of the line, shoppers say they will now have to leave home hours earlier — in the middle of the turkey dinner for some.”[1] Of course, Wal-Mart stores would be open all day, as usual; the significance of midnight lies only in terms of the sales; the stores would still need to be staffed all day. In 2012, 10 p.m. became the new normal. Two years later, 8 p.m. (20:00h) earned the distinction. Four hours into Thanksgiving was apparently enough for Kmart to “go all the way,” opening at 6 a.m. on Thanksgiving. Old Navy extended back to 9 a.m. It is amazing how fast a trickle from a few cracks can turn into a deluge, especially when profit is the force beckoning the water down-stream. 
Resisting the smooth flow in 2011,  an apparent anti-entropic energy-attractor was on track to blaze a new path. Bill Gentner, senior vice president for marketing for J.C. Penney, refused to go along with herd down the easiest path of energy transduction, which can paradoxically render the person, species, or human organization less fit to adapt via natural selection. “We wanted to give our associates Thanksgiving Day to spend with their families,” Gentner said just before Thanksgiving in 2011.[2]  In standing on this principle, the management group at J.C. Penney voluntarily resisted the “quick buck” (i.e., pulling in money as soon as possible) and perhaps even held business calculation at bay in the face of a normative societal “constraint.” 
Lest I am “gilding the lily” (i.e., painting a halo around Bill Gentner’s head), J.C. Penny’s management may also have been seeking to amass reputational capital with the intent to “spend” it to increase sales revenue  beyond 2011. The company could then be fitter in adapting to a nonlinear (i.e., chaotic) business environment, and thus more likely to survive through the cumulative cascades of natural selection. Linking evolutionary theory to thermodynamics and applying the fused thrust to business, I contend that capturing and concentrating energy in the battery, or storage cell, of reputational capital enables a company to survive under the pressures of natural selection by functioning as a transductor of energy along a high energy gradient. 
Unlike floating down-stream with the other fish, adding to the swirling force of an eddy enables an enterprise act as a conduit on a much steeper energy-gradient. Concentrating acquired energy rather than merely passing it through as though a digestive track is requisite to taking the road less travelled down steeper energy-gradients than those in the status quo. Similar to the time value of money, the delayed gratification enabling an enterprise to ski on a steeper slope renders the organization more fit or adapted to its environment and thus profitable beyond tomorrow. In other words, functioning as an energy-conduit along a steeper gradient profits a business in terms of natural selection, and thus a more secure continued viability.[3]
Alternatively, taking the alternative route, the more convenient one, ultimately leads to extinction. Typically, convenience knows itself as a lie. For example, Holly Thomas, one of Macy’s spokespersons, wrote in an email in 2011 regarding employees working on Thanksgiving, “There are many associates who would prefer to work this time as they appreciate the flexibility it affords their schedules for the holiday weekend.”[4] As if referring to a summer baseball team rather than employees, Molly Snyder, a spokesperson at Target, said that her company does its “best to work around the schedules of [its] team members.” Nevertheless, a Target employee told me that the store managers do not in any sense do their best to accommodate exogenous schedules of the underlings. In going with a bland subterfuge rather than adapting to societal norms, Target's management put the company at odds with the principle of natural selection. 
The lure of instant gratification in lieu of reputational capital and fitness to survive the accretions of natural selection over time can easily short-circuit efforts to charge the battery at the expense of increased sales revenue in the short term. Sadly, the management at J.C. Penny succumbed in 2012 to opening stores at 10 p.m. on Thanksgiving. The following year, the company joined many others in opening at 8 p.m. (20:00h). Nothing punctures a pressurizing balloon quite like that the piercing edge of hypocrisy. Put another way, having stores open on Thanksgiving evening not only cuts into or even eliminates Thanksgiving dinner (i.e., in the evening) for many store managers and non-supervisory employees, but also sends the passive-aggressive message that they don’t count after all. Actions speak louder than words. 
So J.C. Penny’s management wimped out, or lapsed back to the bottle yet without hitting bottom. Being less fit than otherwise to navigate the turgid currents in natural selection over the long term, the retail giant risked being caught unaware should a careening stone hit a sweet spot from a smaller foe releasing a burst of (stored) potential energy to take advantage of a steep energy gradient. From this tale, we can now recognize the tyranny of the road most traveled as a well-worn, deep-rutted path of self-destructive (i.e., dysfunctional) business strategy. In other words, business as usual is woefully far indeed from good business management. Nevertheless, the vast majority of management groups in companies are under the false impression that scientific management has optimized modern management. While technical coordination aimed at the perfection of efficiency is important to a business functioning as an energy-attractor and transductor along a steep slope, the size and depth of the shared blind-spot bewilders me and beguiles the pro-business American society at large. If I am correct, business could be done much, much better.
 

1. Stephanie Clifford, “Thanksgiving as Day to Shop Meets Rejection,” The New York Times, November 11, 2011.
2. Ibid.

3. William C. Frederick, Natural Corporate Management: From the Big Bang to Wall Street (Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing, 2012).

4. Hadley Malcolm, “Black Friday Backlash as Stores Add to Thanksgiving Hours,” USA Today, November 15, 2011.