September 12, 2026
This last week we celebrated the national holiday of Labor Day, which I guess is the day where we honor those who labor. To be honest, Labor Day has always been a confusing holiday for me, and one that I’ve never paid much attention to. There’s no big family dinner like Thanksgiving or Christmas. There’s no special church services like Easter, and there are no parades or fireworks like the 4th of July. More importantly, nobody has ever given me a gift on Labor Day. Even Memorial Day had a yearly routine for my family. As a kid, my mom and I would commemorate the holiday by visiting the local cemetery and putting flowers on the graves of our dearly departed family members. As for Labor Day? Well, we didn’t do anything. Then again, maybe that’s was the whole point of the holiday.
When I was a kid, I always found the idea of having a holiday just a few weeks after we started school to be a bit weird. However, when I played football in school the first Monday of September was most certainly NOT a holiday. I remember my coach telling us that Labor Day was a holiday for the rest of the world, but we, by gosh, were still having practice. Apparently, football has no respect for national holidays.
Once I got out of school and was biding my time looking for jobs, I’d spend my days between job interviews working for farmers, driving tractors and working their fields. Seems as though Labor Day meant nothing to them either. In the farming community the holiday was just another day, and while the rest of country was doing whatever people do on Labor Day I was usually cruising around in some field from seven in the morning until nine in the evening.
Once I started working at Texas Instruments though, I figured I could finally enjoy the true meaning of the Labor Day Holiday. However, this was not to be. Working a compressed work schedule means that we worked every holiday that fell on our scheduled work days. If a holiday fell on the days of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, or every other Saturday, I was at work, and that even meant Christmas! Holidays like Christmas and the 4th of July roam around the week though, but Labor Day and Memorial Day were always stuck on Mondays which means I worked every one of them for thirty-five years. I guess it was a fair exchange though. My fellow workers who worked the opposite end of the week had to toil away every Good Friday and Thanksgiving. I suppose I’d take working Labor Day over working Thanksgiving.
As far as I was concerned, Labor Day was just a day when I didn’t get any mail. But there were some upsides to working the holiday. The most important advantage being, I got paid for it! Indeed, I would get my normal pay, and in addition, the company would slap on another day’s pay for the holiday. So I’d get double pay for working a holiday that I never really saw the point of to begin with. Wow! What a deal! On top of that, the bosses weren’t coming in that Monday morning which would always put my supervisor in a better mood for the Sunday night shift. And if I got stuck doing daily reports, I knew if I made some kind of a screw up it wasn’t quite as serious as a normal day. This is because most of the 175 people who I sent the report to every day were more than likely ignoring it for the morning. They were all at home, enjoying their holiday.
Now that I’m retired, I finally get to experience the joy of not having to work on Labor Day. So with great expectations I woke up Monday morning on Labor day to find that it’s just another day. So I’m not working Labor Day Monday now. Well, to be honest I wasn’t working the previous Monday either nor will I be working the following Monday or the additional Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. So with that thought, the first Labor Day I’ve actually had off in thirty-five years means absolutely nothing! I read somewhere that the holiday is the unofficial end of summer, but the day’s temperature had shot up to 102 degrees, and the following days were all over a hundred degrees as well! It certainly didn’t feel like the end of the freaking summer to me!
So even though Labor Day has held very little weight for me during my work career, it means even less to me in my retirement days. Wow, who would have thought. Perhaps next year, I’ll go a bit crazy and find some kind of grueling job to suffer through from sun up to sun down just to spite Labor Day. Of course it will have to be something inside because I’m guessing the temperature will be over hundred degrees again. I can only hope Halloween will be more exciting.
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