Can the government create a holiday out of thin air?

Today is Veteran’s Day, and there has been some interesting discussion on the new Christian Libertarian Facebook group about it. But one thing came to my mind as I was reading the posts…  Does anybody – conservative or liberal or whatever in between – ever wonder why the government has the power to just suddenly establish holidays? From what I can tell, there are two problems with this:

(1) A holiday officially declared by the Federal Government is unconstitutional. There is no power in the Constitution to establish a holiday, or to do 99% of the other things the Feds do for that matter. This gets particularly ironic with “Constitution Day”, which unconstitutionally requires unconstitutionally established educational institutions to teach about – you guessed it – the Constitution. Although C-day is not strictly speaking a “holiday” where certain privileged classes (i.e. government workers) get a day off, the contradictory nature of it all is biting.

(2) Government-established holidays subtly reinforce the meta-narrative of the-state-as-religion, because a holiday is, after all, a “holy day”. I get the idea of commemorating events, that’s fine, and obviously a day like Veteran’s Day isn’t treated the same way as true “holy days” like Christmas or Easter, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

What do you think?