Sunday becoming just another day

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 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."