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1. 

   simpsonfan2 said, 8 months ago

   St. Brendan came from Ireland a lot earlier.
2. 

   chireef said, 8 months ago

   @simpsonfan2

   well if you really want to split hairs the Amerinds, better known as Native Americans got here 15-20 thousand years ago.
3. 

   Mark Nelson said, 8 months ago

   October 9th is Leif Erikson Day.
4. 

   AshburnStadium said, 8 months ago

   As many have already posted, Columbus didn’t discover America for the Europeans. Several had been here hundreds of years earlier (St. Brendan almost a thousand years before).
   Columbus believed that he made it to Asia until the day he died. That’s why Native Americans were called “Indians” until just very recently.
5. 

   AshburnStadium said, 8 months ago

   I believe that Columbus Day should be replaced with Election Day as a national holiday.
   By the way, I’d like to wish our Canadian friends a happy Thanksgiving. They celebrate just as we in the States do, except for the fact that they celebrate it on the same day that we celebrate Columbus Day.
6. 

   cdward said, 8 months ago

   Not sure if we should celebrate Columbus at all. He wasn’t the first, he got it wrong, and then when he did get here, he imprisoned and annihilated much of the people he encountered. The population of what is now Haiti was virtually wiped out.
   http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/hispaniola/index.html
7. 

   lcdrlar said, 8 months ago

   We celebrate it because his “discovery” opened the colonization of the continent by Europeans, and open trade routes to the vast resources of the “Americas” (actually named after Americo Vaspucci – hope I spelled his name correctly).
8. 

   Robert Tatro said, 8 months ago

   I am fascinated by the theory that Chinese treasure fleets arrived in the Atlantic 70 years before Columbus. The book is “1421: The year China discovered America” by Gavin Menzies.
9. 

   Shyygirl27 said, 8 months ago

   @cdward

   I don’t and my children don’t get the day off from school.
10. 

    masnadies said, 8 months ago

    I used to get the day off school, which was excellent because it was my birthday.

    The “Dia de la raza” holiday is excellent. It’s not really celebrating the guy who didn’t really discover America and bring conquering and disease, but it does celebrate the diversity of people we have in the Americas today, and for those of us in the Americas, well, I guess that’s the best spin we can put on those conflicting feelings we have nowadays between kind of wishing the indigenous peoples had been left alone in peace (or rather, fighting just amongst themselves from time to time) and the fact that we rather enjoy being alive and living in this beautiful place.
11. 

    dfrechet said, 8 months ago

    Pobrecitos!
12. 

    flake-67121 said, 8 months ago

    Columbus discovered cigars for the civilized places. Have one!
13. 

    oldman2013 said, 8 months ago

    baldo shows intellegence sometimes
14. 

    phritzg said, 8 months ago

    It’s a postal holiday. As a retired letter carrier, I can say I hated these minor holidays, when everybody else worked. The clerks would come in anyway on those days to sort and distribute mail to all the routes. On Tuesday, we had twice as much mail to sequence and deliver. So some mail would be delayed. It would usually take the average route until the end of the week to catch up. The mail is like a river, it never takes a day off to stop flowing.
15. 

    hippogriff said, 8 months ago

    phritzg: And now they almost all fall on a Monday, so the usual week-end backlog is added to the holiday backlog. Back in my day, we didn’t even have vehicles, but had to take the bus. One bus driver accused us of putting a good pack mule out of work and we really couldn’t argue the point. I actually got to meet some post office pack mules coming out of Supai, AZ, once.
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