Skip to content

We used to have Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday — February was a very Presidential month!

February 21, 2011

My grandfather received this postcard in 1908 for Washington's birthday. The caption on the front reads "Washington and his family at Mount Vernon" and it's signed by his Aunt Bertha on the back.

Have you ever wondered whatever happened to Lincoln’s birthday and how we ended up with this “Presidents Day” holiday? And just what does it mean?  Is it a mashup of Washington and Lincoln’s birthday? That’s what I always assumed, until Snopes set me straight. This post, explains how Nixon (yes, Nixon) created “Presidents Day” as a holiday meant to honor all presidents — not just Washington and Lincoln.  (So I guess we are celebrating Nixon today, too….)

2 Comments leave one →
  1. February 21, 2011 10:08 am

    I think it’s so cute that your grandfather had an Aunt Bertha…and that she sent him postcards! 🙂

    • Sabra Smith permalink*
      February 21, 2011 5:47 pm

      You’d probably be charmed to know that his uncle saved the “funny papers” from the Sunday paper for him.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: