As a traditionalist, of course, I naturally incline to just keeping the calendar we have, and honor what has grown and worked over time. That said, if you were going to design from scratch a list of things for America to commemorate with federal holidays, the end of slavery would be one of the big ones that ought to make the list. That used to be effectively commemorated by Lincoln’s birthday, but he has never actually had a national holiday, and the list of states that celebrate his birthday has been in sharp decline. That is a shame; Lincoln is at least as worthy of a national holiday as George Washington, more worthy than Martin Luther King Jr., and unquestionably more worthy than Christopher Columbus. Instead, partly because his birthday is so close to Washington’s, we get “Presidents Day,” as if we are celebrating the two of them equally with Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan. The current holiday least deserving of commemoration is Labor Day, which marks neither a preexisting cultural holiday (such as Christmas) nor a national milestone (such as Columbus Day, July 4, or Thanksgiving), nor a monumental figure. But Labor Day, like Memorial Day, has the advantage of having become one of the tentpoles marking the start and end of summer, and being placed immediately before the start of the school year in much of the country. (Placement on the calendar is also why I have long argued that the Martin Luther King holiday would have been better situated in August to mark his “I Have a Dream” speech rather than his birthday a few weeks after the end of the Christmas holidays.) Perhaps a more practical solution would be to either demote Columbus Day or eliminate Veterans Day as a separate holiday and promote the celebration of living veterans together with the war dead on Memorial Day. Bear in mind, Memorial Day is the much older holiday, dating to 1868 in the aftermath of the colossal bloodshed of the Civil War. Veterans Day was originally created as Armistice Day to celebrate the end of the First World War — a big event, but in the long sweep of things, a lesser one in American history than the end of slavery.