Labour Day always feels like the pressure is on to squeeze every last bit out of summer. It’s a most laborious way to “end” summer, with a dark cloud looming over the long weekend like being on the beach on an overcast day. The usual Sunday doldrums — or dread, depending on your situation — shift to Monday and this Tuesday becomes the Mother of all Mondays. Monday, the holiday, is a little ruined in the mix.

What a strange and terribly confused long weekend we’ve collectively created. All that pressure distracts from the reason for the long weekend itself: to celebrate workers, the eight-hour workday and the notion of the “weekend” itself.

The Canadian holiday can be traced back to 1872 and the Toronto Typographical Union’s printers strike that fought for a nine-hour workday. In April of that year, there was a march and 10,000 people gathered at Queen’s Park. The workers won and eventually, in 1894, Labour Day became official each September in Canada.

Since there isn’t a particularly strong reason to celebrate labour in September, perhaps it would be better to celebrate all of what it represents on May 1 — International Workers Day — as so many other countries around the world do. Since many precarious workers work more than nine hours a day, maybe it’ll kick-start a new call for workers’ rights, without the distraction of the arbitrary and false end of summer that Labour Day currently represents. Oh, and make May 1 a holiday, too.

Instead let’s call this fine weekend the “Two-Thirds-or-Thereabouts-Way-Through-Summer” holiday. It would be a reminder to everyone to embrace the weeks of summer to come, and respect, for once, the long-suffering autumnal equinox. How must that equinox feel on its special day, Sept. 22, when everybody is all “Oh hey, autumnal, we celebrated you three weeks ago. Sorry you weren’t there.” By its nature, the equinox is quite even-handed, so it doesn’t put up a fuss, but let’s not let it down again.

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