Like all national holidays — which every state can observe (or not) as it likes — Presidents’ Day is a bit of a mess. ABC News explains that the holiday is officially all about George Washington, our first president and hero of the Revolutionary War. In fact, the holiday on the third Monday in February is officially called Washington’s Birthday, but it’s generally thought of as an all-purpose day honoring all 46 of our presidents — and many states have their own interpretations.

For example, She Knows notes that in some states, Presidents’ Day is used to honor another president: Abraham Lincoln. Some honor Thomas Jefferson instead. And some states, like California, officially honor all our presidents. As the Seattle Times reports, 12 of our presidents owned slaves, and eight did so while in office. The Washington Post reports that our 10th president, John Tyler, was literally a traitor — he ended his political career being elected to the Confederate Congress (though he died before he could be seated).

In other words, many of the presidents being honored on Presidents’ Day have some pretty problematic aspects. And yet, as the Christian Science Monitor notes, the president who did the most to abolish slavery, Abraham Lincoln, doesn’t have a holiday to honor him and likely never will.

Incredibly, many people in the U.S. weren’t aware of the significance of June 19th until very recently. As PBS explains, that day is Juneteenth, which celebrates the day in 1865 when General Gordon Granger proclaimed all slaves in the state of Texas (the last state in the Confederacy to still have active slavery) to be free. For more than a century, the holiday was almost exclusively celebrated by the Black community, and, as NPR explains, despite the day being celebrated annually since then, it wasn’t made an official federal holiday until 2021.

Still, that’s progress, and of all the things to celebrate, the end of slavery should be at the top of the list. But celebrating Juneteenth as a day of freedom is perhaps too simple. The fact is, by June 1865 slaves in Texas had been technically free for more than two years, ever since Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. But, as The Undefeated explains, they were physically prevented from leaving plantations because their former owners simply ignored the proclamation.

The Washington Post reports that it wasn’t just criminal landowners — Texas politicians also refused to enforce the executive order on the grounds that the state constitution forbid releasing slaves from their bondage. The day we celebrate as the end of slavery in the U.S. should be dated two years earlier than 1865, and Juneteenth acknowledged as a reminder of just how hard Americans worked to keep slavery in place.

For most people, Labor Day is just a three-day weekend marking the end of the summer party season. Or a great shopping opportunity for back-to-school stuff for the kids. But behind the cookouts and final swims there’s a violent, radical past that most of us either don’t know about, or just take for granted.

The Conversation reports that in the early 19th century, workers in the U.S. manufacturing sector routinely put in 70-hour work weeks (or more), usually under miserable conditions. Half a century later, there had been some minor improvements, but laborers were still poorly treated and overworked. The labor movement had formed unions, but they were weak and divided. There were frequent violent clashes between workers and the wealthy folks who owned the factories and mines and, well, everything else.

Labor Day was originally designed to unite the unions and to push for things we now take for granted, like the eight-hour work day and the weekend, which practically didn’t exist as a concept back then. Teen Vogue explains that the Pullman Strike in 1894 — which paralyzed the nation and ended in chaos and violence when federal troops were sent in to break it — inspired president Grover Cleveland to create the Labor Day holiday as a conciliatory gesture. When we fire up the grill on the first Monday in September each year, we should remember that people literally died for our weekends.

Throughout history, holidays have often served as superficial gestures, and Veteran’s Day is a great example. Our veterans have made incredible sacrifices serving their country — often the ultimate sacrifice. But setting aside one whole day a year as Veterans Day serves mostly as a reminder that we treat our vets pretty poorly the other 364 days a year.

The Atlantic explains that the vast majority of Americans have little connection to their country’s military forces — only about 1.5 million people are on active military duty, with another 850,000 or so in the reserves. As such, Veterans Day and other public displays of support for military service personnel can be pretty empty and vacuous.

Worse than the empty spectacle is how we treat our veterans on the days that aren’t national holidays. USA Today reports that just about every Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital in the country sports longer wait times and higher incidences of infections and bed sores than non-VA care facilities. And a 2015 Rolling Stone notes that unemployment is a constant problem for our veterans, about half of whom were unemployed at the time of writing. This is also tied to why veterans make up about a third of our country’s homeless population. There is also likely a connection between these statistics and disproportionately high level of post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by veterans. Setting aside one day a year to say thank veterans for their service isn’t nearly enough.

Putting aside the fact that it’s odd for a secular country to pick just one religious holiday to make official, Christmas has in almost every way transcended its Christian origins. In the modern day, it’s essentially a holiday dedicated to capitalism and shopping.

But this isn’t a new development. The Toledo Blade notes that prior to the mid-19th century, Christmas celebrations were dominated by “Puritan fustiness,” which resisted any sort of pomp, and that many Christians didn’t celebrate it at all, because it’s not mentioned specifically in the Bible. Later, according to the Financial Times, Christmas became a chaotic affair with drunks reeling in the streets, sparking an effort to redefine the holiday as a family affair focused on the home.

Futurity reports that in the 1800s, retail stores began to exploit the holiday for purely profit-based reasons. This was also when secular imagery like the Christmas tree and Santa Claus became prevalent, as did worries that Christmas was becoming too commercial. By the 1960s, “Peanuts” was complaining about the impact of capitalism on Christmas. Cut to the 21st century and, according to Reuters, even the Pope is concerned about it. Christmas was once a deeply religious holiday for a specific group of people, but today it might as well be called Capitalism Day.