toledoblade.com --

THIS year, Columbus Day falls not only on the second Monday in the month but on Oct. 12, the very date in 1492 that Christopher Columbus' sailors first saw one of the islands in what today are called the Bahamas.

Oct. 12 used to be Columbus Day every year, but it's not any more because factories and other businesses thought it was inconvenient to have workers taking off a day in the middle of the week, except when they absolutely couldn't avoid it, like on Independence Day, Christmas, and New Year's.

Maybe if they really tried, they could get Congress to move New Year's Day so it was always celebrated on a Monday, but not Christmas - not even if it meant more shopping days.

Columbus Day is a peculiar holiday. When I was growing up in New England, Thanksgiving was a lot more important, but that's because the Pilgrims landed in New England. Columbus landed 1,500 miles away - in a different country. In fact, he never set foot in what we know as the United States. Good thing, too, because today he'd be deported as an illegal alien.

There isn't any good food on Columbus Day, either. The Fourth of July has great eats. People cook hot dogs, hamburgers, steak, chicken, corn on the cob - just about anything that can be charred on a grill.

On Thanksgiving, most Americans eat turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, and apple and pumpkin pie, many until they have to loosen their belts and take a nap. My family had turkey again at Christmas but we didn't mind, even though it was only a month later. We had ham at Easter, but I don't think it had any religious significance. Maybe my Dad just liked ham.

Lots of other families I knew had ham too. Some people say eating ham was considered to be good luck in some parts of Europe before Christianity arrived. I don't know; it wasn't very lucky for the pig.

Maybe everyone should eat Italian food on Columbus Day. Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, after all. Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain just paid for his three ships - the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Every schoolchild knew those names when I was a kid. I wonder if they do now. Queen Isabella had more to do with paying for the voyage than Ferdinand, although the story about her selling the royal jewels to finance the Columbus aren't true. The Santa Maria ran aground in Haiti and was lost but if Isabella minded, she didn't say so. My wife says this proves women were smarter and had more vision than men even 500 years ago.

I'm not sure about that, but I know that not everyone likes Columbus Day today. Native Americans don't think much of him. To them, Columbus was the first in a long line of Europeans who enslaved and killed millions of native Americans and stole a whole continent that's become pretty valuable. Even five centuries later, they see a good reason not to celebrate Columbus' arrival in the Americas. That's a long time to hold a grudge.

Many countries in Latin America kept the holiday but don't make a hero out of Columbus. In the Bahamas, Oct. 12 is Discovery Day. That has its own problems because the people living there when Columbus showed up didn't know they were lost.

Since 2002, Venezuelans have celebrated Oct. 12 as Day of Indigenous Resistance, focusing on native American resistance to Columbus, Hernando Cortez, Francisco Pizarro, and other European conquerors.

This antipathy toward Columbus is understandable. If the Wampanoag tribesmen living near Plymouth Plantation had known what was ahead, they probably wouldn't have shared the Pilgrims' Thanksgiving meal in 1621 either.

Observances vary across the United States as well. Some states with large indigenous populations either don't recognize the federal holiday or have changed it to celebrate native populations. In other places - Boston and Cleveland, for example - there are big parades marking Columbus' "discovery" of the New World. Not by accident, those cities also have large Italian populations but few native Americans.

It's tough when a person's hero is another person's villain. There are some disagreements so fundamental that not even pizza can resolve them. That's too bad because dwelling too much on how history should judge Christopher Columbus distracts from the reality that however we got here, we're all in this together now.

Kendall F. Downs is a Blade associate editor.

Contact him at: kdowns@theblade.com

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