A lack of local festivities suggests Labor Day at Nicholls isn’t filled with parades or pageantry, but likely with the holiday’s intended gift: rest.

What do Nicholls students actually do on Labor Day? That’s what I set out to discover. I started with the Nicholls events calendar. What did I find? Nothing. 

I figured there had to be at least one worthwhile event in Thibodaux to put on the radar for the holiday weekend. I checked the Explore Houma events calendar only to find one lone event titled “2025 Midget Mayhem Wrestling.”

Not exactly the holiday spirit I imagined. 

Searching further, I managed to dig up a grand total of two Labor Day weekend events nearby: the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival in Morgan City, honoring the town’s two major industries, and the Southern Decadence Parade in New Orleans, a vibrant celebration of the LGBTQ community and culture.

Both sound like they could make for a memorable weekend, but for the average Colonel looking for a local Labor Day tradition, the list felt… underwhelming.

To get some answers closer to home, Lilly, our beloved social media manager, ran a poll asking what students do on Labor Day. The result? Crickets. Not a single response. 

That silence made me wonder—why hasn’t Labor Day taken shape as a long-weekend celebration, especially with football season kicking off? That question led me back to the holiday’s origins. 

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the holiday was established in the late 19th century as a way to honor American workers and their contributions to the country’s prosperity. The holiday served to provide a well-deserved day of rest—a pause in the relentless grind of work.

That’s when it clicked. Maybe doing nothing on Labor Day isn’t missing the point at all. It’s embracing it. 

One day off hardly feels like enough to honor the workers who keep the country running. Perhaps that’s why rest, rather than pageantry, feels like the more fitting choice.

Doing nothing isn’t laziness. It’s a reminder that rest has value. 

So if you spent Labor Day catching up on sleep, lounging on the couch, or simply embracing the art of doing nothing, you might have celebrated the holiday in the truest way possible.

Sometimes, what we really need is the freedom to do absolutely nothing at all.