The signs are up, the flyers are out, the bracelets are for sale and the orange barrels are starting to gather around Roosevelt Center. As someone who moved to Greenbelt a little over a year ago the Labor Day Festival was the first sense of what Greenbelt was all about to me. The Festival website says the Festival “celebrates the strength of America’s workforce and families.” The Festival, in my opinion, is about this community coming together to celebrate its past, present and future. I am proud that I belong to a unique community that celebrates what labor has done for our country. I also am proud that we have made Labor Day the “the largest all-volunteer organization in the state of Maryland,” according to the Festival website. Not only do we celebrate labor, we try to make people not actually work for the Festival. Before I moved here I thought of the holiday as ignored and poorly celebrated. If anything, it was the start of the school year. One of my former educator colleagues described it as a “speed bump” to her curriculum. Click here to see the paper for more of Jill’s thoughts.
