SEPTEMBER 4: Larry’s Labor Day
Larry was five years old and he loved holidays. But the coming holiday—it was not Larry’s. Nor had it anything to do with Larry. The thought of that bothered him. He wished somehow it could be different.
He had asked his father what Labor Day meant and his father had told him that it was a holiday set apart as a day of recognition of the laboring class. He had not quite understood what that meant but his father had explained that it meant a day set aside in honor of there being such a class as a laboring class, showing that to belong to the laboring class was something dignified and to be respected.
Larry knew then that it was useless for him to have a share in this holiday—a real, real share in it at least. This was different from Xmas and Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July.
But then a happy thought came to him. For the next few days Larry was very, very busy. Every one thought he was busily playing and making mud-pies and such, but not at all.
And on the morning of Labor Day they knew what Larry had been doing. He led his father and his mother and his grown-up sister and his fourteen-year-old brother to the very far corner of the garden which had always been set aside as Larry’s mud-pie playground.
There he showed them a tiny garden set out with paths and borders of pretty pebbles. Growing in the garden were ferns which Larry had transplanted from the woods and a tiny red geranium stood proudly in a little bed by itself. It had come from Larry’s nursery flower pot.
“You see,” he said, “I wanted to have a holiday to-day—I mean I wanted to have a right to the holiday, as daddy talked about laborers having, so I’ve labor-ed too.” It was rather a hard word to say but he managed it well.
“And now,” he turned to his family, “don’t you think I can have a little share in Labor Day too—a real little share?”
And his family said “Yes,” and I think you’ll agree with them too!