Labor Day Tradition

I'll just start by saying to make things perfectly clear that this is not a post about emergency preparedness, I do more of that later(yes, I really will get to it). Today is Labor Day, a holiday which most people don't know the reason for, I'm going to see if I can remember the reason, I learned it in AP American History which was some time ago. As I recall Labor Day stems back to the days when people worked in factories, you know, back when little kids got terrible lungs from being in hot, dirty, factories for hours and hours on end; I'm sure you've read a book or seen a movie about it. While conditions in factories were terrible for children they were just as terrible for adults; in the factories people generally worked every day of the week and for hours and hours on end for terrible pay. Because of all of these conditions people began going on strikes, and if I remember correctly there were mass strikes that led to labor day...I can't remember why we got the holiday out of it but there you go.
Anyway, getting back to today, it's a tradition in my mom's family to gather at my Grandma's over night the night before and then go and have breakfast at a park. In the early days it was always at Salem Pond(nothing to do with the witch trials), but we haven't gone there for the last several years. Today though we made it back to Salem Pond, I think because my future cousin-in-law was there and the tradition was explained to him and Salem Pond was remembered.
I don't know that Salem Pond was all that exciting of a place but it was a lot cooler in my memory, I remember there were these huge tires that were half buried in the ground that you could climb on, naturally those haven't survived time and the need to have safer play grounds. There was a stream running through it which I remembered once I saw it, my cousins and I used to have little boats that we floated in it but the stream was kinda yucky now. One thing we did do though was feed the ducks.