Comments & Curiosities:

Take the day off. I mean tomorrow, not today.

And why do we get to laze around all day tomorrow with nothing to do but think happy thoughts?

Because, it is Labor Day or, if you’re British, Labour Day. The Brits like to toss in an extra “u” whenever possible — labour, flavour, colour, honour. I’m not sure why.

We have studied the origins of Labor Day before, so this will go fast.

Aside from being one more excuse for a three-day weekend, and you can never have too many of those, Labor Day started with the labor movement in Canada in the 1870s; it’s an annual celebration of workers and all the worker-type things they do; it became a national holiday here in 1882, with a presidential order calling for celebrations to honor workers and their families and “…the strength and esprit de corps of the trade and labor organizations.”

In the early days, there were excruciatingly long speeches by politicians and union leaders. Thank God we’re over with that part.

Labor Day is the most universally recognized holiday, celebrated in hundreds of countries, although in most of them May 1 is the big day and it’s called May Day or International Worker’s Day — very trendy in socialist and communist countries.

In this country, most of that stuff is unknown or forgotten or both. If Americans think about Labor Day at all, they think of it as the end of summer, just as they think of Memorial Day as the start of it.

OK, fine. But here is what I want to know.

Forget the three-day weekend, where did the plain old garden-variety two-day weekend come from? Most of us take it as an article of faith that we don’t have to work on Saturday and Sunday, but was it was always so?

No, my industrious little friend, it was not. How the two-day weekend came to be is very interesting, assuming there’s not much going on in your life.

Before the Industrial Revolution, life was hard, there was no Bloomingdale’s and “schedule” was not something most people knew about or cared about. If you were a farmer person, you worked from dawn until dusk doing farmer-type things, six days a week. If you were a laborer, you huffed and puffed and labored from morning ‘til night, six days a week.

Why six? Because the idea of Sunday as a day of worship and rest came straight from the Bible and when the church talked people listened.

“Listen up people,” the church said, “no working on Sunday, just praying.”

“Cool,” the people said, “that farmer stuff is a drag anyway. Stinky too.”

The ban against working on Sunday was so extensive that “Blue Laws” were passed in the 19th and early 20th centuries that prohibited most businesses from operating on Sunday, especially those that involved leisure activities or adult beverages.

Believe it or not, on the Right Coast, where certain people are from, Blue Laws were still in place in the 1970s. Other than a neighborhood market or two everything was locked up tight on Sunday.

By the way, can you name the only national fast-food chain that’s closed on Sunday? We have a winner — “Chick-fil-A.” Its founder, 86-year old S. Truett Cathy, is a devout Baptist who wants to leave Sunday for what the Bible intended, and that applies to both company-owned and franchise stores, thank you.

In the 1920s, the emerging labor movement started to advocate and agitate for a five-day workweek. With one day for worship and another day for rest, people would return to the salt mines renewed and refreshed and whistling a happy tune while they hacked at the salt.

OK, maybe not the last part.

But it was considered a radical, loopy, over-the-top idea. Why on earth would anyone need two days a week off — and what would they possibly do with themselves all day Saturday? The idea lay there like a lox until the most unlikely of allies in the history of unlikely allies popped up…Henry Ford, famous car guy.

You could have knocked everyone over with a feather. Henry Ford and the labor unions got along about as well as Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in “War of the Roses,” maybe a little worse.

And yet, there was Henry Ford, speechifying for a five-day workweek, and in 1926, actually shutting down his factories every Saturday and Sunday. Henry Ford said he was just being a good boss, but skeptics said he was just being a good businessman. You could do a lot of things and go a lot of places in two days that you couldn’t go or do in one — especially if you had a car. Pretty clever.

Decades before it happened, Henry Ford figured out that weekends and cars go together like Joan Rivers and annoying — it’s the perfect match. In 1929, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America were the first union to demand and get a five-day work week, they got it and other companies quickly followed suit.

The weekend has been an alienable right for most of us ever since, and a three-day weekend is the Mother of All Weekends, except for the even more rare four-day weekend, which is nirvana. More recently, some people have been clamoring for a four-day work week, but watching the world’s economy implode has cooled that argument down to about 20 below zero for the time being.

So there you have it — Labor Day, Labour Day, and where Fords and weekends come from. I ran across a quote by Helen Keller that sums up the original intent of Labor Day nicely: “The world is moved along not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”

We’re with you, Helen, totally. But there’s no sense shoving stuff around on the weekend.

I gotta go.

PETER BUFFA is a former Costa Mesa mayor. His column runs Sundays. He may be reached at ptrb4@aol.com.