EngAGE Stories

Portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

From the National Archives:

George Washington’s Birthday is celebrated as a federal holiday on the third Monday in February. It is one of eleven permanent holidays established by Congress. . . .

Washington’s Birthday was celebrated on February 22nd until well into the 20th Century. However, in 1968 Congress passed the Monday Holiday Law to “provide uniform annual observances of certain legal public holidays on Mondays.” By creating more 3-day weekends, Congress hoped to “bring substantial benefits to both the spiritual and economic life of the Nation.”

One of the provisions of this act changed the observance of Washington’s Birthday from February 22nd to the third Monday in February. Ironically, this guaranteed that the holiday would never be celebrated on Washington’s actual birthday, as the third Monday in February cannot fall any later than February 21.

Contrary to popular belief, neither Congress nor the President has ever stipulated that the name of the holiday observed as Washington’s Birthday be changed to “President’s Day.”

From another National Archives article:

For advertisers, the Monday holiday change was the goose that laid the golden “promotional” egg. Using Labor Day marketing as a guide, three-day weekend sales were expanded to include the new Monday holidays. Once the “Uniform Monday Holiday Law” was implemented, it took just under a decade to build a head of national promotional sales steam.

Local advertisers morphed both “Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday” and “George Washington’s Birthday” into the sales sound bite “President’s Day,” expanding the traditional three-day sales to begin before Lincoln’s birth date and end after Washington’s February 22 birth. In some instances, advertisers promoted the sales campaign through the entire month of February. To the unsuspecting public, the term linking both presidential birthdays seemed to explain the repositioning of the holiday between two high-profile presidential birthdays.

After a decade of local sporadic use, the catchall phrase took a national turn. By the mid-1980s, the term was appearing in a few Washington Post holiday advertisements and an occasional newspaper editorial. Three “spellings” of the advertising holiday ensued—one  without an apostrophe and two promoting a floating apostrophe. The Associated Press stylebook placed the apostrophe between the “t” and “s” (“President’s Day”), while grammatical purists positioned the apostrophe after the “s” believing Presidents’ deferred the day to the “many” rather than one singular “President. ”

Advertising had its effects on various calendar manufacturers who, determining their own spelling, began substituting Presidents’ Day for the real thing. Eventually, when printed in the newspaper or seen on the calendar, few gave thought to its accuracy.