The very meaning of Sunday

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 like 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, picking up some CDs at Best Buy, moving through a 24/7 culture.

“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 that 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 in 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 of the week.

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 working week, 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 couldn’t 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 – a bank! – has focused an entire promotional campaign around doing business on Sundays.

One of the most ubiquitous characters in America’s weekend landscape – the Sunday paper, with its color-splashed comics, coupon pullouts and paperweight girth – is changing, too. Sunday circulation dropped by nearly 596,000 in the past two years, according to Editor & Publisher magazine. People say that even on Sunday, they lack the time for such languor.

“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,” a 1990 book. “Our notions of time and space are collapsing.”

It’s hard to imagine a place that knows more about Sundays than Parade, the magazine that since 1941 has been inserted into Sunday newspapers – more than 340 at last count, for nearly 36 million readers. Editor-in-chief Lee Kravitz believes the American Sunday remains intact – even if the activities have changed.

“As our lives became busier, that’s sort of taken over Saturday,” he says. “So we do those chores – all those things we have to do, banking, laundry, housekeeping, shopping. Some of it has spilled onto Sunday. But for the most part, I think Americans still protect the specialness of Sunday.”

In 2000, a Parade-commissioned study found 70 percent of Americans say they do what they want on Sundays. An overwhelming 90 percent like Sunday more than or as much as any other day of the week, and 92 percent said they spent time with family. The margin of error was 2 percent.

It seems, then, that what’s changed about Sunday is not the idea – rest, relax, recharge the batteries – but the content. While traditional activities remain, the do-it-now culture of commerce and communication means that downtime has been redefined upward.

Sunday is no longer, as the 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.”