Among the things you should rightly check when grocery shopping (price tags, nutrition labels, ingredient listings), there’s one other packaging point to consider, namely when you’re in the bakery section: the color of the tag or twist tie on the bag of your loaf of bread. Why? Because it can actually tell you whether a loaf is fresh or past its prime. But what do those colors mean?

Most brands of bread use twist ties or tags that are color-coded by day of the week, so stores know exactly how long something’s been sitting on the shelf. Most stores pretty much use the same standard system: a blue tag for loaves baked on Monday, green for Tuesday, red for Thursday, white for Friday, and yellow for Saturday. If you’ll only accept the freshest bread possible for you & your family, then think about shopping on days other than Wednesday & Sunday, which are when a good many bakers & bakeries take the day off.

The system might seem complicated at first blush, but it’s actually fairly easy to remember the order, since the first letter of the color names are in alphabetical order for each day of the week, going from B for blue on Monday to Y for yellow on Saturday. The tag system is very good at helping to ensure loaves of bread don’t sit on shelves for several days, so you’re less likely to find anything on the weekend that was baked at the beginning of the week.

Knowing which colors stand for which days, you’re able to look for those that have been stocked as close as possible to the same day that you’re shopping. And who doesn’t want to get the best bread for your “bread” (money)?

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While no one’s totally sure exactly when or why the fashion rule of wearing white only during the summer became a thing, the most probable reason is that it was due to late 1800s snobbery.

Following the Civil War, mega-rich guys’ wives ruled over high society with an iron fist. But, as more & more people became rich, it became more & more difficult to be able to differentiate between respectable “old money” families & those vulgar “new money” upstarts. So, to determine who & what were & were not acceptable, women in the 1880s that were already part of the “in-crowd” developed a bunch of fashion rules that everyone who was anyone was required to follow. So, even if a lady attended a play or opera wearing a dress worth more than what most Americans at the time would’ve made in a year, but the sleeve length was wrong, other women would know not to pay her any mind.

Another of those silly rules: not wearing white outside the summer months. White was strictly for weddings & resort wear, never fall dinner parties. Of course, September can be super-hot & wearing white makes a lot of sense. But, if you wanted to be accepted by society, you just did not do it. Once Labor Day became a federal holiday in 1894, high society adopted it as the natural end of summer fashions.

Not everyone followed the rule, however. Even some high society ladies chose to blaze their own trail & buck the trend, most notably Coco Chanel, who would wear white all year long. But, while the rule was originally only observed & enforced by a few hundred women, it ultimately trickled down to pretty much everyone else over the years. In the 1950s, women’s magazines were making it clear to middle class America ladies: you are only to pull your white clothing out of storage on Memorial Day before promptly putting it back in the day after Labor Day.

Nowadays, fashion rules are much more relaxed about what colors to wear & when. But still, pretty much every year you’re inevitably going to hear someone insist that white after Labor Day is unacceptable. And that would absolutely be true…if you were a 140+ year old snobby millionaire.

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Why is Labor Day Monday a day off for many Americans? And why does it land on a Monday each year?

If you’re one of the lucky ones who get to enjoy a 3-day Labor Day weekend, you can thank activists & politicians for that.

Labor Day goes back to Tuesday, September 5, 1882. That’s when workers’ rights activists organized the first Labor Day parade in New York, as a way to demand fewer hours for more pay. After Labor Day was celebrated once again on September 5 the next year, the Central Labor Union (the country’s biggest at the time) decided to move the holiday to the first Monday in September in 1884.

A decade later, in 1894 the U.S. government recognized Labor Day as an official holiday. President Grover Cleveland signed a law setting an annual day to honor working Americans. While International Workers’ Day, or May Day, did already exist at the time, that particular day honored victims of the 1886 Haymarket affair, where seven police officers & a civilian were killed during a labor protest in Chicago. So, the government chose to create Labor Day instead of combining the two. And, thanks to the influence of the Central Labor Union, Labor Day was set on the first Monday in September.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson reinforced Labor Day’s spot on our calendar when he signed the “Uniform Monday Holiday Act” into law. That legislation moved several other federal holidays from their specific dates to Mondays: Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Presidents’ Day, Columbus Day, and the already-set-on-Monday Labor Day (don’t fix what ain’t broken, right?).

There was a push in 1909 by the American Federation of Labor to try & move Labor Day to Sunday. But pretty much everyone was already content to celebrate it on a Monday, so that effort failed. And, when you think of it, celebrating Labor Day at the tail-end of a three-day weekend makes sense, since it gives workers a day off on what would normally be the start of a busy workweek. Now if we could only the Friday before off, too…

Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via social media (@AndyWebbRadioVoice), or shoot me an email at [email protected].

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