Do you ever find yourself getting confused over actual holidays and legal holidays? I do. About all that I am ever really sure of is that holidays mean sales. In fact, I am convinced that if you were to take certain holidays and ask the person on the street how we came to have them and what they mean, the majority wouldn’t have the foggiest. Pulaski? Who’s Pulaski?

In 1927 Reinhold Niebuhr noted how Thanksgiving can become twisted and wrested from its germinal essence. He wrote:

Thanksgiving becomes increasingly the business of congratulating the Almighty upon his most excellent co-workers, ourselves. It would be better to strut unashamedly down the boardwalk of nations than to go through the business of bowing before God while we say, 'We thank thee Lord that we are not as other men.’ (…