Labor Day rules and rituals: Nobody actually knows why we do any of this

There is a certain kind of person, at a certain kind of barbecue, who announces, with the flat authority of Scripture, that white is not to be worn after Labor Day. No one has ever produced this law. It’s enforced like a grudge: the offense long forgotten, the point being the enforcement.

That, it turns out, is the whole personality of the holiday: a house built on a foundation nobody can locate, in honor of a man history can no longer confidently name.

Labor Day has spent a century accumulating quirky social rules no legislature passed but nearly everyone obeys anyway.

The first Labor Day — not yet official, just an idea a union decided to act on — took place on September 5, 1882, in New York