Monday marks Presidents’ Day, giving students across the country a break as most public schools are closed.
Other institutions will also close in observance of the federal holiday.
One of them is the United States Postal Service, though customers can still use the website and self-service kiosks in lobbies at select locations. Regular mail delivery and services will restart on Tuesday.
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Most banks, including Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, Capital One, PNC and Wells Fargo, will be closed, as well as the stock market. TD Bank will be open, though, just as it is for another federal holiday: Indigenous People’s Day.
Retail stores and restaurants are likely to be open, though it’s always smart to double check before you go.
UPS pickup and delivery services are available, and store locations, though GroundSaver and Mail Innovations deliveries need one additional business days’ time in transit. FedEx will also be open, albeit with modified service.
This year, the U.S. will observe 11 federal holidays. That’s around the same amount as other nations. Pew Research recently found that the global median is 13.
History of Presidents’ Day
People started celebrating first President George Washington’s Feb. 22 birthday after his death in 1799. It became a federal holiday in the 1870s, though was unofficially observed for most of the 1800s, according to The History Channel. Then-Arkansas Sen. Stephen Wallace Dorsey proposed the holiday, and former President Rutherford B. Hayes signed the law on it in 1879.
While at first, Washington’s birthday only applied to the District of Columbia, it expanded nationwide in 1885.
Then, in the late 1960s, congressional lawmakers proposed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, championed by Sen. Robert McClory of Illinois, The History Channel wrote.
This act proposed changing the celebration of several federal holidays from “specific dates to a series of predetermined Mondays,” The History Channel said. It also suggested commemorating Lincoln’s birthday, on Feb. 12 along with Washington’s birthday.
The Uniform Monday Holiday Act passed in 1968 and took effect via executive order in 1971 — but another of McClory’s ideas, calling Washington’s Birthday Presidents’ Day, was unsuccessful after opposition from the first president’s home state of Virginia.
Still, the shift away from Feb. 22 to the third Monday in February as the holiday’s date led some to believe the new date was meant to honor Lincoln and Washington. The name Presidents’ Day stuck even more as marketers began using it to advertise three-day weekend sales. Dozens of states use Presidents’ Day as well — it’s never been changed at the federal level, however.
