I kind of wanted to avoid this topic completely today but I learned something (re-learned, maybe?) and the timing works out too well to not write about it so here goes:

As you probably know, today, January 20, is Inauguration Day.

It has been for decades, unless January 20 falls on a Sunday, in which case Inauguration Day moves to January 21.

Earlier this month, when I was thinking about the upcoming dates and events (and days I might not want to turn on the TV, say), I thought about Inauguration Day and wondered if it would be moved to the 21st because of Martin Luther King Day.

Turns out, they don’t do that.

I know this because I looked it up, so what follows is a combination of what I knew and what I learned:

Here’s the thing - I’ve always loved studying about the presidency. One of the things my fifth graders did when I was teaching was write research reports about the presidents. So sometimes I’d learn something new about an obscure president, and sometimes I would hear the same facts repeated year after year, but it was fun for me because sometimes I already knew those things.

(It’s also interesting to view the presidency through the eyes of a fifth grader. “What if somebody chooses not to follow the rules?” they’d ask, or something along those lines. And their dumb teacher who clearly didn’t understand the ways of the world would say something like, “Oh, there are consequences set up for that and the system is kind of structured in a way that doesn’t allow that to happen.” Fifth graders are very perceptive.)

But anyway, as a result of those research papers, I learned a lot of extra trivial stuff about the presidency, including how Inauguration Day was moved from March to January to cut down on the time between when a president was elected and a president took office.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the extra time was needed so that a president could get a staff on the same page, which makes sense - you couldn’t call someone up on the phone. It took time, I guess, for your horse-carried letter to reach someone, and then for their response to come back, et cetera.

But as technology advanced, the March date was less necessary, so it was moved to January.

I just wasn’t sure, also considering how ‘new’ the holiday is, that Inauguration Day ever fell smack on Martin Luther King Day.

There’s math involved here. Every Inauguration Day comes a year after a leap year, so, what it’s like 1 in every 6 years January 20 hits a Monday? And an inauguration is every 4 years…so somewhere there’s a formula to figure that out.

But luckily we already have the answers to the test: Bill Clinton in 1997 is the only president whose inauguration fell on January 20, Martin Luther King Day. In 2013, January 20 fell on a Sunday, so Barack Obama’s public inauguration ceremony took place on Martin Luther King Day. (There was reportedly a private swearing-in on the Sunday, so this one is slightly different.)

So: 1997, 2013, and 2025. 16 years and 12 years between the events happening.

Maybe, if there are future presidential elections and inaugurations, the next time the events coincide will be in 2033, continuing a mathematical pattern? I don’t know how that works.