Curiously Celebrating Christopher Columbus »
Today the United States - and to be fair, a number of other countries - celebrate Columbus Day. Unlike many other holidays named after a person, this one doesn't celebrate his birth (for the most part because no one knows exactly when he was born) but when he first landed in the Americas. Interestingly, even that is perhaps a bit of a misnomer, because according to what slim facts there are, land was only sighted on October 12, 1492, and the land in question was an island in The Bahamas. We don't even know which island it was!
While The Bahamas are in North America, it's not like he set foot on the US mainland in 1492, and certainly not on that particular day. So why do we celebrate today? Why do we celebrate today at all? Actually, it's not really today, since here we do things on the closest day to weekend, and, well, that would be Friday, and for some bizarre reason, we do it on the second Monday in October. I don't know why. Let's just talk about Columbus instead, okay?
