10 Facts , About Presidents' Day.<br />1. , Presidents' Day occurs on the <br />third Monday of February.<br />2, Originally, the holiday was meant to celebrate President George Washington's birthday. .<br />3. , In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes signed the observance of Washington's birthday into law.<br />4. , It was the first nationally recognized federal bank holiday to celebrate the life of an American.<br />Martin Luther King Jr. Day <br />was the second.<br />5. , In 1932, the holiday was used to reinstate the <br />Purple Heart, which was created by Washington <br />to honor wounded or killed soldiers.<br />6. , President Richard Nixon changed the date of the <br />celebration in 1971 under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.<br />The Act was an attempt to have more <br />federal holidays fall on Mondays.<br />7. , It also combined the celebration of Washington's birthday with Abraham Lincoln's birthday.<br />8. , By the 1980s, Americans began to refer to the holiday as "Presidents' Day" because marketers used the terms to advertise sales over three-day weekends.<br />9, By the early 2000s, half of the U.S. changed the name to "Presidents' Day" on their calendars.<br />10, Today, it is considered to be a patriotic day of celebrating presidents of the past and present
