Today is George Washington’s birthday. Since 1971, because Congress decided the nation needed more three-day weekends and fewer opportunities to honor great men, we celebrate the occasion on the third Monday in February. To the feds, if no one else, that holiday is Washington’s Birthday.

The states don’t have to honor national holidays, though, and many don’t. Here, as in most places, Monday was Presidents Day, supposedly honoring Washington and Abraham Lincoln, though not much. It’s a muddy thing that seems to matter little. Last Monday was just another day off for most folks.

We’ve lost something important in all of this. Although Washington’s birthday did not become a national holiday until 1885, Americans had commemorated the date since the late 18th century. Lincoln’s Birthday, Feb. 12, never was a national holiday, and now many of the states that had formerly recognized it lump it in with Washington’s.

Presidents Day is a mistake. Independent recognition matters.

Consider the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, now the only universally celebrated day of commemoration for an individual American. As such, King’s birthday uniquely provides us with a civics lesson, a celebration of the sacrifices and integrity of King and his leadership in the civil rights movement, and an opportunity for national introspection. Undoubtedly, much of this stems from the recency of his assassination and the state of race relations in contemporary America.

But recency doesn’t explain it all. The schools, media and public officials in the days before “Presidents’ Day” used the birthdays of Washington and Lincoln to instruct us in the virtues of the president who founded the nation and the president who preserved it at its time of greatest crisis.

Now, Presidents Day is primarily marked by silly marketing stunts, frequently featuring talking pennies and dollar bills. I find a lot of folks further confuse the issue, believing Presidents Day should be used to honor all presidents. I’m a “respect the office” kind of guy, but that’s asking a bit much. Just how great a share of the presidential 24 should be set aside to sing the praises of Warren Harding, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce or, well, you choose?

Holidays are what parents call teaching moments. Each Martin Luther King Day we have opportunities to experience again the power and eloquence of the “I have a dream” oration at the Lincoln Memorial and “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

That’s what national commemorations should do: remind us of the defining moments in our history and provide for community celebrations of great men. Keeping such moments alive binds us together as a nation, nourishing our common American heritage and summoning what Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called the “better angels of our nature.”

What’s to be said about Washington? Familiarity has bred apathy and ignorance. We think we know the stories, but the hero has become a caricature. David McCullough writes in “1776”: “He was not a brilliant strategist or tactician, not a gifted orator, not an intellectual. At several crucial moments he had shown marked indecisiveness. He had made serious mistakes in judgment. But … he learned steadily from experience. Above all, Washington never forgot what was at stake and he never gave up.”

What was at stake then remains at stake today. Our continued freedom and independence require constant sacrifice, vigilance, courage and virtue. That is why we celebrate our greatest leaders. Such ceremonial observances inspire new generations of Americans.

Washington was not a good and ordinary man made great by the struggle. He was an extraordinary man in whose service other men became heroes. He summoned them to greatness through exhortation and example, character and commitment. And they responded.

Too often, we live so much in a precarious present or a fanciful future that we neglect the past. Doing so leaves us unmoored from the struggles that defined the American character.

All schoolchildren used to know the opening line of Henry Lee’s eulogy of Washington: “First in war – first in peace – and first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

Now, we observe his birthday by racing to be first in line at the strip mall. The man who, more than any other, brought this nation into being deserves better.