Today's bank holiday is the most honest day of the year. It is not a pretend religious holiday, such as Easter. It is not a supposedly political holiday, such as May Day. It is simply what it is: a day off work. The truth is that national holidays are now fundamentally dishonest. Only a minority of the population regards Christmas as anything other than a gorge-fest. An even smaller number treats Easter as something beyond a four-day break.

I write this in New York, where today is Memorial Day, ostensibly the day when the nation pays its respects to soldiers who have given their lives to defend the freedoms embodied in the US. There could be no worthier cause for such a commemoration.

In most respects the US has a far greater sense of the respect owed to the fallen than do we. Our Remembrance Day is patchily observed and, other than in formal ceremonies, only by the generation old enough to have direct memory of the Second World War. There has been a modest resurgence of the two-minute silence, but stand on any street at 11am and the modesty of that resurgence will be all too apparent.

Even in the US, where veterans carry political weight and patriotism is regarded not with shame but pride, Memorial Day is now little more than another holiday. It is more widely recognised as the semi-official start of summer than as the day of remembrance for the fallen. Even more, it is the start of the summer sales.

It might be that there are few more appropriate ways to celebrate the sacrifices made in defence of our freedom than exercising that very freedom through shopping. But I would be surprised if that was the motivation behind the scrums at Bloomingdales this weekend.

Just as the occurrence of national holidays on days of Christian religious significance is now little more than tradition, so even secular commemorations are merely excuses, rather than reasons, for holidays. We do such occasions a disservice by pretending that they matter to us as anything more than days off work. We should give up the pretence, take holidays for their own sake, and restore some dignity to the nominal purpose of existing national holidays.

Instead of paying them little more than lip service, we should leave it to individuals, families and communities to celebrate them as they see fit — holiday or not.

UPDATE: Yes, I know. Bad phraseology on my part. I should have written that no one even bothers pretending that today's Whitsun holiday is anything other than a day off work.