The World's Common Tater

I wrote the below post last year about how I’ve always loved the federal holidays when schools were open. It was nice to have a holiday when the kids were in school. I didn’t do anything fun, but it was nice to have some hours of my own. When my job announced that we were going to open on Columbus Day and replace that holiday with the day after Thanksgiving I thought it was a good idea. I would rather have that day anyway. Then I realized I work the Saturday after Thanksgiving and had the Friday off already. So, all I get this year is an extra day of work and a day of vacation added to my bank when I work the day after the new holiday. If you read my blog regularly you probably know how I feel about another day at work. I could really use that lost holiday today.

It has nothing to do with Columbus, though it is fun to celebrate by going out, getting lost, invading someone’s house and declaring it my own I do enjoy that, but that’s not why I’ve loved Columbus Day.

My love of the day came late in life. I didn’t care anything about it until I got a job where Columbus Day is a day off. Even then, it didn’t become one of my favorite days off. It was in October and the weather was cooler, but it couldn’t compete with some of the other days off.

Once I had a kid in early elementary school it became a holiday I spent volunteering at the school. With both of us having full-time jobs, we weren’t able to do much more than chaperone a field trip here and there, so we used Columbus Day and Veteran’s Day as a time to go and volunteer in the classroom. That’s not when it became my favorite holiday. Honestly, there were plenty of times I was annoyed at spending my day off at school.

This is my admission that Columbus Day and Veterans Day became two of my favorite holidays when the kids got older and they no longer wanted us in the classroom. It is one of the few days off we had where the kids still went to school. I didn’t have to spend my day off entertaining kids I didn’t have to spend my day off watching bad children’s television. I could spend my day off relaxing(assuming my wife didn’t give me jobs to do). We never did anything really fun. I wish we had spent some of the time going out and doing a “date day” but it was nice to have a few hours off.

Now, here I am on my first empty nest Columbus Day. We are both still off. The kids aren’t here. It seems like a normal Columbus Day, but it isn’t. The kids won’t be coming home from school this afternoon. It’s not any different from my standard Friday or Saturday off. We still won’t do anything fun outside of the house. I might do yard work. I might clean a bathroom. I will watch the Braves game this afternoon.

Apparently, the moral of the story is that I am, and always have been, boring.