Columbus Day
CAP takes off federal holidays, including Columbus Day, so I’m on a weekend-style reduced blogging schedule today. Ever since coming to DC, I’ve been struck by how different Columbus Day is outside the areas of traditional Italian immigrant settlement than within. In places where good pizza is widely available, Columbus Day is a somewhat big deal with parades and celebrations and so forth. Here in DC, just a stone’s throw from the real northeast and connected to it by the Acela, we don’t have a traditional Italian-American immigrant population and thus we’ve got no real Columbus Day. This even though we (obviously) have a lot of federal employees and people who work for firms that take the federal holiday schedule, so there’s actually rather a lot of folks enjoying a day off.
32 Responses to “Columbus Day”
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October 13th, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Wasn’t it renamed Indigenous People’s day in 1995? Shows how out of touch I am. All I know is I never ever got the day off.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
Here in Colorado, Columbus Day has turned violent in the past. The parade in Denver was Saturday, and nobody was arrested this year, which is unusual. But there were still some conflicts. It would be better for us if we could ignore Columbus Day completely. It turns out that our Native American population has a rather different opinion of Columbus. Who would have thought?
October 13th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I never understood why Italian-Americans latched on to Columbus Day. Not only was Columbus a monster, he didn’t do anything for the Italians.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Columbus hardly seems the type of person whose legacy should be celebrated — he wasn’t the first European to ‘discover’ America, and there is the issue of his treatment of indigineous peoples.
Also as a basic issue of fairness, Federal employees recieve more days off compared to other working folk. Columbus Day should have been traded out as a federal holiday when MLK day came into being.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Columbus Day?!
October 13th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
In Berkeley, it is definitely Indigenous Peoples Day, with parades etc. The whole idea of Columbus Day seems wildly anachronistic now, doesn’t it?
October 13th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
At my last job in NYC, the building was closed for “History and Heritage Day” on the day I think of as Columbus Day.
Of course, we also worked with a TON of Canadians and this same day is Thanksgiving for them, so it was just as well to be closed.
October 13th, 2008 at 2:05 pm
Matt
As a New Yorker you should know that the real bitchin’ “Columbus Day” parade in New York no longer is the Italian but is now the Hispanic one, the Dia de la Raza, generally held the day before Columbus Day. Yesterday was the one in New York up 5th Avenue. Fantastic! Bolivia rules!!!
As the grandson of a Spaniard you too can march in it. Though the Spanish section is pretty weak compared to the Latin Americans. Not just Bolivia, but Colombia and Guatemala were great too.
I used to march in the ones 30-40 years ago with my Spanish Dad, and man were they lame parades. Mostly a bunch of guys in suits wearing boinas (Spanish name for a beret), hating on Franco, plus occasionally some wonderful Spanish (gallego) bagpipe music if you were lucky.
But with the multi-country Hispanic influx into New York over the past 3-4 decades, and the distancing of the ties of Italian-Amerians with Italy — there just aren’t that many recent Italian immigrants in NY and the Italian-Americans are by now pretty much 3rd and 4th generation and Italian-American in the media means The Sopranos — the “Hispanic Columbus Day parade” has become the better show.
I had 2 Spanish high school exchange students with me and my two youngest sons at the parade yesterday, and it was fascinating how the two Spanish boys didn’t relate at all. They’re Europeans, and for them there’s just no connection to the Hispanic New World stuff. Whereas my wife and mother-in-law, grandaughter and daughter of Italian immigrants, relate wholeheartedly. I’m not a great fan of American exceptionalism, but the mythos of an immigrant society really is different from one that emphasizes terroir or motherland/fatherland. Now if we could only get more Americans to go back to that mythos instead of seeing immigrants as terrorists and welfare breeders.
October 13th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
In Hawai’i it’s called Discoverer’s Day to honor Captain Cook, which has in the past led to some conflict with the indigenous Hawaiian population, most of whom think they were here before that bozo arrived. Who knows, they might even be right!
October 13th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
So this means you have terrible pizza? So sad.
October 13th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
So this means you have terrible pizza? So sad.
The pizza isn’t great in DC, but let me tell you, it’s light-years ahead of California’s pizza situation.
October 13th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving today by having lunch at Earl’s (a secretly Canadian chain restaurant). It’s the only place in Denver you can get dry garlic shortribs.
October 13th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
I’m a City of L.A. worker, and I really have no idea why I have today off. I’m of Italian heritage myself, and I don’t even know of any parades or even any substantial Italian-American lobby here, although I did see a poster in Hollywood for a Feast of San Gennaro celebration with Adam Carolla and Jimmy Kimmel as guests.
I had been under the impression that our Cesar Chavez Day had been a trade-out with Columbus Day, but that’s not the case… we get both days off.
Not that I’m complaining. I do remember when I was a kid that the library would be closed on California Admissions Day (September 9), but I haven’t seen anything closed for that in probably 20 years. Maybe that got traded out for MLK Day.
October 13th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
We should change it to a universal Heritage Day, have parades, everybody celebrate our own and each other’s heritage, and dump all the exclusivist crap.
(Especially including St. Patrick’s.)
October 13th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
South Dakota, partially because it has very few Italians but relatively many Native Americans, has turned Columbus Day into Native American Day. It happened in 1990 under a Republican governor, who, apparently hadn’t learned the lesson from the modern GOP that wherever there is a societal wound one should pour salt on it to win elections instead of trying to heal it a bit.
October 13th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
Actually, we should scrap the whole thing in all its variations and make Election Day a national holiday instead.
October 13th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
I haven’t lived in Baltimore for a few years, so I don’t know what is going on there lately. But not only do they have a decent Columbus Day Parade, but they have this huge monument to political patronage called the Columbus Center for Marine Biotechnology Studies (or something like that) It was originally built to rake all them huge biotech dollars (remember those) in the 1990’s for UofMD. They named it after Columbus as a sop to the Italian political machine because it blocked Little Italy’s view of the Harbor. There is even a Columbus statue out front. They had a Marine Themed Science Center inside that went out of business due to financial problems tied to very low visitation. When they closed up shop they auctioned off many of the fixtures to the new Creation Museum in Kentucky. I have no idea how the larger center is doing these days.
Who cares.
At one point in the 90’s there was a plan to put a huge statue of Columbus done by some Russian artist in the Chesapeak Bay just outside the Key Bridge welcoming people to Baltimore a la the Statue of Liberty. One of the few stupid ideas that didn’t see fruition in Baltimore.
Honoring Columbus leads to nothing good.
In order to piss off K-Lo I am honoring today as Paddington’s Birthday.
October 14th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Here in the great Northwest, we just don’t have Columbus Day. I’m an elementary school teacher, and we don’t get the day off. Some teachers discuss Columbus in school, but it’s minimal. I’d speculate that this is due to the large Native American population in this part of the country.
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