http://www.azcentral.com
Sunday rapidly losing much of its specialness in U.S.
Ted Anthony
Associated Press
Jul. 18, 2004 12:00 AM
Once, within living memory, it was a day apart in many places: a 24-hour stretch of family time when liquor was unavailable, church was the rule, shopping was impossible and, in some towns, weekend staples such as tending the lawn and playing in the park met with hearty disapproval.
But America changed, and it dragged Sunday along with it.
Though Sunday still means worship and family time for millions of Americans, today it also means things it once didn't: 12-packs of Bud, the NFL on TV, catching up with the week's accumulated errands or picking up some CD.
"Today, for a lot of Americans, Sunday's just another day you have to go to work at Wal-Mart," says John Hinshaw, a labor historian at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa.
Last week, the Virginia Legislature fixed a loophole it accidentally created when, attempting to abolish old "blue laws," it gave workers the right to take Sundays off as a day of rest. In the few days that the loophole was on the books, employees around Virginia started telling their supervisors they wouldn't be coming to work on Sundays.
The legislative mistake was a quirk, nothing more. But its quick and definitive correction by Virginia lawmakers summoned back into special session illustrated how markedly Sunday's place in American culture has evolved.
In a land where the pursuit of happiness is part of the national charter, Sunday's evolution attests to both Americans' harried lives and their determination to wring every drop of fun out of every day.
The Protestant notion of Sunday began to change in the 1800s with immigrant laborers, many Roman Catholic, who saw things differently. Many were devoted to "a Sunday that took a very different shape: church in the morning and leisure in the afternoon," says Alexis McCrossen, author of Holy Day, Holiday: The American Sunday.
The 20th century brought pushes toward a shorter workweek, and a major work-reform law passed in the 1930s created more down time and made Sunday less pivotal, at the same time commercial culture really took hold.
"You have a commodification of everything in American life, our time, our space, our experiences," McCrossen says. "And that puts a lot of pressure . . . to open up Sunday because there's so much profit to be made on this day that most people don't work."
Across the nation, laws governing Sunday conduct, some dating to the 17th century, have fallen. In some places, like South Carolina, the changes created a crazy-quilt patchwork that allows some stores to open at some hours while others can't.
In Maine, it wasn't until 1990 that voters repealed a law barring Sunday shopping at supermarkets and department stores. In Texas, as late as 1985, everything from kitchenware to air-conditioners to curtains could not be sold on two consecutive weekend days, a move designed to outlaw them on Sunday.
These days, it's unimaginable to many Americans, particularly younger ones: A mall closed on Sunday? The supermarket unavailable? Even laws governing Sunday alcohol, though they remain on some states' books, are falling away.
Today, 31 states permit Sunday sales of liquor, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. In the past two years, nine states initiated Sunday sales, including Massachusetts, where some of the earliest moral-conduct laws were passed.
New Jersey-based Commerce Bank has focused a promotional campaign on doing business on Sundays.
"We've erased a lot of the distinctions between night and day, between weekday and weekend," says Susan Orlean, author of Saturday Night in America. "Our notions of time and space are collapsing."
Sunday is no longer, as writer H.L. Mencken put it, merely "a day given over by Americans to wishing that they themselves were dead and in Heaven, and that their neighbors were dead and in Hell."
"Maybe maintaining the idea of time having some relevance may actually become more meaningful," Orlean says. "I'm not sure that people really want to live in a universe in which there's no day and night, no week and weekend. I don't know that that gives us anything."
). Having the option to do a few errands on Sunday allows me to free up some time during the week when Im really exhausted and just want to come home and be a bum. 