When is Labor Day?

There are two types of people in the world.  Those who know when Labor Day, Memorial Day, President’s Day are, and those who can never remember if Martin Luther King Day is in January or February (it’s January, just in case you fall into the latter group).

I have always been the former.  I can tell you what date Thanksgiving falls on next year.  I greedily plan vacations and trips around long weekends and kids’ school schedules out to two years in advance.  That might seem like overkill for some of you, and if you have any advice for me on how to see far off relatives, reunite with old friends, or #makememories with my family at Disney without super scheduling holidays, please share!

We are all pulled in so many directions these days: kids, work, local friends, alumni weekends, wanting those 8 hours of sleep a night. I find that it takes real work to make sure those long distance relationships don’t just fade to the Instagram abyss.

For instance, my family of four is traveling to San Diego for Labor Day this weekend.  We’ve rented a huge Airbnb right on the beach with 4 other families, all good friends of my husband from his Stanford days.  Two families are flying in from New York City, one with a 5 month old and a two year old.  One family is flying down from Seattle with a 4 year old, 2 year old, and one on the way.  And our Bay Area buddies are bringing a bun in the oven.  

These are 5 best friends from over 15 years ago that haven’t seen each other, all together, since a trip down to Monterrey 5 years ago.  We had to plan this trip last Fourth of July!  In fact, my husband was driving us up to Tahoe when I emailed to everyone about the possibility of getting together 14 months from then!

By some miracle, and the doctor of the group having enough seniority to switch her on-call weekend, no one had a wedding, bachelor, bachelorette party, or birth of a child to stop us from all getting together.  Lo and behold, though, about a month ago, when we were all finalizing travel plans, someone had to ask, “Wait, guys, when is Labor Day?” Turns out he booked the wrong weekend.

I’ll give him a pass for a few reasons.  Labor Day is on the early side of September this year, he did just have a baby, and the more I talk to people, and casually ask, “What are you doing for the holiday?” the more I realize, they simply do not know when these regularly occurring holidays are.  

My fingers are crossed that the airlines will take pity on him and switch the flight days.  It would be really fun to see the next generation of kids all playing together, but if not, there’s always Memorial Day 2020, I guess…