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Poor George Washington.
First he had to change birthdays from Feb. 11 to Feb. 22 because Britain changed calendars when he was in his early 20s. Then Congress changed the celebration of his birthday to a moving date that could never fall on the day itself. And now, many Americans don't even know that the holiday is his alone.
On Monday, many of us will celebrate something called "Presidents Day." Stores will have sales and federal workers will stay home and banks will close, and many will think that the day honors Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or maybe Washington and all other former presidents.
But it's really just Washington's day.
Apparently, the whole mess - like so many other, more serious messes - started in 1968, when Congress was considering a bill creating a new federal holiday, Columbus Day, on the second Monday in October, and moving the observance of Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day and Veterans Day to Mondays, so that federal workers would have more three-day weekends. (Effective in 1978, Congress shoved Veterans Day back to the traditional date of Nov. 11, and effective in 1986, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday joined the Monday holiday list.)
Now, to understand what comes next, it helps to understand just what a federal holiday is. It's not a national day off: Congress lacks the power to grant that, as you can see by all the people who have to work on holidays. Essentially, it's two things: a day off for federal workers, and a day on which debts aren't due. By granting a federal holiday, Congress tells everyone who owes a debt due on the holiday to wait till the next business day to pay it, which is why banks observe all the federal holidays that the rest of us don't.
So in 1968 Congress was considering moving a few, because everyone loves three-day weekends. Since Washington's Birthday was on the list, some wanted to change the name to make it honor both Washington and Lincoln, whose birthday, Feb. 12, is around the same time.
Washington's Birthday has been celebrated since he was alive, and it has been a federal holiday since 1880; it was the first one added to the original 1870 list of New Year's Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Lincoln's Birthday, on the other hand, had never been one, though it was a holiday in many states. None of the states observing it were in the South, and perhaps Southerners' lingering aversion to the president who had so decisively trounced their ancestors accounted for Congress' rejection of the "Presidents Day" proposal. Lawmakers left the third Monday in February - a day that can fall anywhere from Feb. 15 to 21, and thus never on Washington's birthday itself - as the observance of Washington's Birthday.
Congress passed the bill, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it, and since 1971, we have had more of those long mailless and bankless weekends.
The suggestion of a "Presidents Day" was widely reported, and some states ran with it. From Vermont to Texas to Hawaii, some states - but not Florida - changed the name of their state holiday.
The idea is attractive. The South has pretty much gotten over its tetchiness about the Civil War, and most people like the idea of honoring Lincoln too, since we all now realize that abolishing slavery and preserving the Union were excellent ideas. So before you knew it, people were honoring Washington and Lincoln by staging school pageants and doing without mail and saving 10 percent on select merchandise and paying no interest for six months - all those traditional "Presidents Day" events that every patriotic American participates in.
And there matters stood, with a "Presidents Day" in almost everyone's heart and Washington's Birthday in almost every lawbook, until the 1990s, when some people started saying in effect: "Hey, y'all, cut out this "Presidents Day' stuff, it's still Washington's Birthday!"
Someone - it's not clear who - started a little hoax along the way. The perpetrator, probably a humorist of sorts, wrote that when the National Holiday Act took effect in 1971, President Richard Nixon issued a proclamation stating that the third Monday in February was to be "Presidents Day," honoring all presidents, "even myself."
It's believable, right? Nixon did so many self-aggrandizing things - not just Watergate; remember those comic-operetta uniforms at the White House? - that people fell for it right and left. It appeared as fact in many newspapers and even on the Web's premier myth-debunking site, Snopes.com.
But it's apparently not true, and some checking shows it's not even plausible. For one thing, the proclamation was supposedly issued Feb. 21, 1971. On that day, a Sunday, Nixon seems to have issued no proclamations or executive orders at all. The order he did issue on the subject, Executive Order 11582 of Feb. 11, 1971, doesn't even name the holiday, referring merely to "the third Monday in February." Moreover, the date of the alleged proclamation falls nearly a week after the third Monday in that year's February; why would Nixon issue such a proclamation six days after the holiday in question?
Newspapers of the time don't mention any such proclamation, and as unpopular as Nixon was, at least in certain quarters, surely someone would have mentioned his awarding himself a federal holiday.
What is true is that some members of Congress have tried fitfully to do something about Americans' confusion, periodically introducing legislation to reinforce the brand identity of Washington's Birthday. Nothing has come of that yet.
That's why every February newspapers face a dilemma: We can call the holiday "Presidents Day," which isn't accurate, or Washington's Birthday, which is accurate but leaves many readers with the impression that we don't know what we're talking about.
The St. Petersburg Times has chosen to call it Washington's Birthday, which has provoked some understandably irritated reaction from readers. We had so much in 2002, for instance, that we published a front-page explanation of our decision on the day after the holiday.
Poor George Washington. If we could ask him, the Father of Our Country would likely be aghast at - and probably a little embarrassed by - all the to-do over his repeatedly shifted birthday.
But Monday is his day, and no one else's. Congress said so.
Happy 272nd, Mr. President.
- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report. Daniel Puckett is a Times copy editor and chairman of the stylebook committee, which worries about issues like this.