*American patriots, circa 2044, celebrating President Quimby’s new winter holidays.*

This is Part 2 of the ongoing series “Vacation For The Nation.” Read Part 1 here.

Welcome back to my series, Vacation For The Nation! As a reminder this is my very real and totally non-farcical campaign to become the 52nd President of the United States of America. In Part 1, I stated my overarching goal and plan for our country. In Part 2, I will audit the first quarter of the year (January - March) and determine how to create a permanent four-day work week for those long, dark winter months. This includes February, which is somehow the shortest month of the year, but never feels like it.

Before we dig into the calendar itself, we have to address an elephant in the room known as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. This act was a major victory for the working class that codified a lot of goodies into law such as a minimum wage, forty-hour work weeks with overtime pay, and child labor standards. However, this neat little bill does not require private employers to provide paid holidays, which makes it a major obstacle for my goal of legally mandated four-day work weeks.

Amending this thing feels like opening a can of worms that billionaires would love to get their greedy little hands on, BUT we’ve amended it successfully on several occasions to increase the minimum wage. My simple amendment to the FLSA would be to mandate paid time off (or premium overtime pay) for all federally recognized holidays in the private sector. Badabing badaboom.

Although, while we’re under the hood tinkering around with labor laws, there’s a heap of issues the FLSA doesn’t cover that it ought to. It does not require vacation, holiday, severance, maternity/paternity/family leave, or sick pay. It does not require meal or rest periods. It does not require premium pay for weekend or holiday work. I’ll get some policy wonks to iron out the details after I’m in office, but we’re definitely adding it all in there. I’m thinking we should at least guarantee the average benefit of what all those happy little European countries are getting.

One more note on the FLSA: when it was originally drafted in 1932 the act proposed a thirty-hour workweek which “met fierce resistance.” It took them a full six years to say “okay, forty hours is acceptable.” If they had signed the original we’d all have been working six-hour days for nearly a century.

The main idea, during dark economic times, was that if we all worked less and divvied up the labor between more people, maybe we’d all make a little less money but we’d all at least have a job to do. This opinion was then shifted: what if we just made up more work to do? Thus, a century later there are loads of bullshit jobs and millions upon millions of people spending their work days trying to run out the clock rather than focusing on true productivity. Even Richard Nixon predicted “a 32-hour, four-day workweek in the “not too distant future.” Hello from the not too distance future, business leaders! Where are ya? Sailing around on yachts?

If you’re interested, you can read a bit more about the FLSA here. Furthermore, recent studies have suggested that the total time a person can concentrate is far less than eight hours per day. It’s more like three hours. Yes, three. All of this to say, under my plan, we are all working less and that’s that.

Finally, some bits of housekeeping for this thought experiment. It isn’t going to work out flawlessly unless we remove exact dates from the equation entirely and declare that all holidays are on Fridays from now on. Sort of a fun thing to yell into the abyss, but the chaos of a holiday falling on random days of the week each year is kind of part of the fun. Let’s follow that with a disclaimer: any federal holiday that falls on a weekend will be observed the following Monday. In the end, some weeks may still end up with five work days while others will only have three. It’ll change every year as the dates jiggle around because reality isn’t that tidy. Now, without further ado, let’s mess about with the calendar.

I love how January kicks off the new year by saying, “no one’s working the first day.” Amazing. We also have Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is downright holiday-worthy, though it’s designated as the third Monday every January, which already brings us to our first quirk of the calendar. As we aim for an average of one day off per seven calendar days, it’s already complicated. Therefore, our first adjustment will be to cement MLK Jr. Day on his actual birthday - January 15th.

Now it’s looking tidy with a holiday on the 1st and the 15th. Our first target for a brand new holiday is January 8th or 9th. Let’s see what some of our existing options are: Earth's Rotation Day, Bubble Bath Day, Winter Skin Relief Day, Show And Tell Day, War on Poverty Day, Stephen Hawking’s Birthday.

None of these feel particularly governmenty or banky-closey and we need everyone on board. I want to create a holiday to honor the contributions of scientists, and conveniently we’ve got Stephen Hawking’s Birthday right here on the 8th! Thus, we’ve got our first new holiday, Scientists Day, January 8th. You’re welcome everyone!

Next up is something around January 20-22, because what I haven’t told you yet, is that we have Holocaust Remembrance Day on the 27th. It’s internationally recognized and should be a day to stay home and do some serious thinking about how we treat each other. Fair? Fair.

Okay, so what’s on the menu to round out our first month of holidays? Day of Acceptance, Cheese Lover's Day, Take A Walk Outdoors Day (really, in January?), Penguin Awareness Day, Sweatpants Day, Celebration of Life Day, and it only gets sillier from there. I like Celebration of Life Day the most, it’s all about spending time with our loved ones and appreciating the people around us who make life worthwhile. I also like the placement of this in January, a way to appreciate that we’ve all survived the big commercial holidays and made it into a new calendar year. I’m running with it, January done!

*New January! What was 20 work days is down to 17.*

*Groundhogs, lovebirds, presidents and a shortage of days. What the hell is February?*

Why is the random leap day month batting second? Why are we celebrating groundhogs, the Hallmark company, and US presidents that have mostly been terrible? Why is the weather so poor and confusing? Why is Feb-ru-ary so dang hard to spell? February is a stupid month that everyone hates and I get to say that because I was born in the middle of it. Try having fun in a cold basement with three sad balloons. Can we go sledding? Maybe but it’s probably half slush, half dirt, and ominously yellow. The movies? Nope! It’s all Valentine’s Day rom-coms. I’ve tried it all, February is no fun unless you can get drunk at a bar. The only saving grace for February 2026 is how neatly all the weeks align Sunday through Saturday.

Groundhog Day is easily the dumbest holiday, until now! Boom, February 2nd, day off! You can spend it looking out the window at all the little critters that periodically invade your yard. Then you might remember that it was actually their yard until you came along, so you should let them eat your plants because they have a greater claim to what’s growing out there than you do. I digress.

Now we’ll need something good for the space between the groundhogs and presidents. Before we do, there’s a record scratch moment here. Why the hell is President’s Day designated as the third Monday of February rather than George Washington’s actual birthday on the 22nd as intended? Well that’s just great, now I’ve got to launch into a tangent about the Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1971. Why didn’t I encounter this in January talking about MLK Jr Day? I suppose I didn’t think much of it.

The UMHA permanently moved Washington's Birthday and Memorial Day to a Monday and added Columbus Day as a federal holiday, also permanently on a Monday. We’ll deal with the horrendous legacy of Christopher Columbus later. The creation of more long weekends, such as Memorial Day, were a goal of the travel industry. Veterans Day was originally included but later moved back to November 11, the actual date of the end of World War I. MLK Jr day was created after the UMHA but also adheres to the format.

Because the UMHA was enacted to appease travel agencies, I’m ignoring it. I’m betting that all of my new creations will be quite friendly to the travel industry. So, what to do about Presidents Day? I think I’ll leave it alone so that no one president can ever steak a claim to it as their own personal holiday. It’ll give the UMHA something to do.

Circling back to the groundhog/president sandwich, Inventors Day will be celebrated on February 11th. It exists already, to some degree, and I think its plenty holiday-worthy. Entreprenurship, innovation, and invention is basically the bread and butter of the American dream. You know their names - Whitney, Ford, Edison, Wright, Franklin - and this is their day, but yours as well.

To round out February, we’ll select a new holiday for the window of February 23-25. Here are the best choices: Hospitality Workers Appreciation Day, World Peace and Understanding Day, or Quiet Day. The first two are intertwined with business organizations which feels counter productive as the aim of this endeavor is to close businesses more often. I think noise pollution is a big problem that deserves more of our attention and respect. Thus, Quiet Day will be February 25th from now on! Stay home and stay quiet, please, so February can go down quietly.

*New February! Now with just 16 working days - unless we’re leaping. Are we leaping? Not until 2028.*

*Old March is totally barren and I’m here to fix that.*

March has nothing?! Not one federal holiday? Who let this happen? I guess once in a while we get Easter in March (though even that doesn’t give us time off). Wait, the date for Easter is based on the freaking moon? So, we’ve got the FLSA and the UMHA but for Easter we say “let the moon handle it.” Good thing I’m here to fix all of the holidays, this is way out of hand. Easter in 2026 will be in April, so you’ll have to wait for Part 3 when I presumably have a holiday showdown with the freaking moon.

With a blank slate for March, it feels initially daunting but there are some easy wins right off the bat. St. Patrick’s Day (17th) and the Spring Equinox (20th) are very close together but can now consider themselves official holidays, thank you very much. As an aside, I’ve always imagined throwing a party for every Equinox and Solstice, we should be celebrating each shift in season as far as I’m concerned. Technically it’s called the Vernal Equinox, not the Spring Equinox, but as the IQ of the average voter seems to be falling precipitously, we’ll keep it simple.

International Women’s Day is another slam dunk for March 8th. With the entire span of human history as my guide, women deserve at least one day to be celebrated. It’s the least we can do. And no, there won’t be a Men’s Day counterpart, please reach out to all of history if you have a problem with that.

Now we’ve got some work to do. We need March holidays around the 2nd to the 4th, plus somewhere around the 27th to the 31st. I could be selfish and claim my late sister’s birthday (4th) and my wife’s birthday (30th) as new holidays, but I don’t think I can tell the banks to close up shop for just me, even if I am the 52nd President of the United States.

As for that first window, March 2-4, there’s nothing worthy that already exists, take my word for it. In honor of my sister, I’m going to co-opt March 4th into becoming Heroes Day. A holiday in which everyone is asked to do good deeds for others or to honor those who have exemplified heroic behavior. Heroes, not Superheros, just to be clear. Though if you want to run around in a cape like a social pariah I won’t be stopping you.

The last empty window of the first quarter is March 27 - 31, and we’ve got some contenders: World Theater Day (27th), Doctors Day (30th), and Transgender Day of Visibility (31st). We’ll have to use the process of elimination. On Theater Day, would you go to a show to appreciate the theater or give the cast a day off to rest? For Doctors Day, do you make an appointment or write a thank you card? Is the point of Transgender Day of Visibility Day to see transgender people out and about in our regular lives or should we honor them with a day off?

Well, process of elimination was a bust. I’m going to poll my Patreon readers as a tie breaker…

…the Patreoners have selected Doctors Day on March 30th! Thanks for playing!

As a final note, yes I see that the week of March 23-27 contains five full work days. However, this corrects in 2027 as the Equinox falls on a Saturday with a Monday observance (as per the terms I outlined to start). So, in 2026 we get a three-day week followed by a five-day week, but in 2027 we split with two, four-day weeks. I remind you, the dates jiggle around because reality isn’t that tidy.