10 Facts , About Presidents' Day.
1.
, Presidents' Day occurs on the third Monday of February.
2, Originally, the holiday was meant to celebrate President George Washington's birthday.
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3.
, In 1879, President Rutherford B.
Hayes signed the observance of Washington's birthday into law.
4.
, It was the first nationally recognized federal bank holiday to celebrate the life of an American.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day was the second.
5.
, In 1932, the holiday was used to reinstate the Purple Heart, which was created by Washington to honor wounded or killed soldiers.
6.
, President Richard Nixon changed the date of the celebration in 1971 under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.
The Act was an attempt to have more federal holidays fall on Mondays.
7.
, It also combined the celebration of Washington's birthday with Abraham Lincoln's birthday.
8.
, By the 1980s, Americans began to refer to the holiday as "Presidents' Day" because marketers used the terms to advertise sales over three-day weekends.
9, By the early 2000s, half of the U.S. changed the name to "Presidents' Day" on their calendars.
10, Today, it is considered to be a patriotic day of celebrating presidents of the past and present