Government offices, the stock market and schools are closed Monday in observance of Presidents Day, but most big retailers are open.

When in doubt, call ahead or look up more specific schedules online for stores in your neighborhood.

Here’s a rundown of what’s open and closed on Presidents Day 2026:

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Government offices

Federal and state government offices are closed. Courts and most schools are also closed.

The official designation for the holiday is Washington’s Birthday after first President George Washington, although it has come to be known informally as Presidents Day. Arguments have been made to honor President Abraham Lincoln as well because his birth date falls nearby, on Feb. 12.

Banks and the stock market

U.S. stock markets and banks are closed Monday but will reopen on Tuesday.

Retailers

Most big stores and other businesses are open.

National parks

National parks are open and free to U.S. residents on Presidents Day. Late last year, the National Park Service announced that admission would no longer be free on Martin Luther King Day and Juneteenth, but instead on June 14, which is Flag Day and President Donald Trump’s birthday. But it is still free on other holidays including Presidents Day, Memorial Day and Independence Day weekend.

Waiting for a mentor: Abby

Kids ‘n Kinship provides friendships and positive role models to children and youth ages 5-16 who are in need of an additional supportive relationship with an adult. Here’s one of the youth waiting for a mentor:

First name: Abby

Age: 13

Interests: Abby loves to draw, paint, do anything involving art. She is into reading science fiction books. She also likes gymnastics, playing soccer and going ice skating.She loves pets! Her family is a foster home for pets. She would love to go horseback riding.

Personality/Characteristics: Abby can be shy at first when you get to know her.

Goals/dreams: Mom hopes to find a mentor for Abby who is patient and understanding.

For more information: Abby is waiting for a mentor through Kids n’ Kinship in Dakota County. To learn more about this youth mentoring program and the 39+ youth waiting for a mentor, sign up for an Information Session, visit www.kidsnkinship.org or email programs@kidsnkinship.org. For more information about mentoring in the Twin Cities outside of Dakota County, contact MENTOR MN at mentor@mentormn.org or fill out a brief form at www.mentoring.org/take-action/become-a-mentor/#search.

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By AARÓN IBARRA and MARÍA VERZA

CONCORDIA, Mexico (AP) — Deep in the coastal mountains above the sparkling Pacific resort of Mazatlan, towns spaced along a twisting road appear nearly deserted, the quiet broken only by the occasional passing truck.

It was near one of these towns, Panuco, that 10 employees of a Canadian-owned silver and gold mine were abducted in late January. The bodies of five were located nearby and five more await identification.

Most residents of these towns have fled out of fear as two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel have been locked in battle since September 2024, said Fermín Labrador, a 68-year-old from the nearby village of Chirimoyos. Others, he said, were “invited” to leave.

The abduction of the mine workers under still unclear circumstances has raised fears locally and more widely generated questions about the security improvements touted by President Claudia Sheinbaum. She signaled her more aggressive stance toward drug cartels in Sinaloa with captures and drug seizures after she took office in late 2024. It has been one year since she sent 10,000 National Guard troops to the northern border to try to head off U.S. tariffs over the cartels’ fentanyl trafficking, much of which comes from Sinaloa.

In January, Sheinbaum held up a sharp decline in homicide rates last year as evidence that her security strategy was working.

“What these kinds of episodes do is demolish the federal government’s narrative that insists that little by little they are getting control of the situation,” said security analyst David Saucedo. He said Sheinbaum had tried to “manage the conflict” while the Sinaloa Cartel’s internal war spread and split the state by obliging people “to take a side with one of the two groups.”

Fleeting security

The mine workers’ disappearance in late January brought more troops into the mountains as they searched by air and on the ground for signs of them.

Mexico’s Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch came to coordinate the operation. Several arrests were made and from information gleaned from suspects, authorities found the clandestine graves.

But the increased security presence has not brought peace of mind to residents.

Roque Vargas, a human rights activist for people displaced by violence in the area, said that “all of the hubbub has scattered the organized crime guys” but he worries they could return. He and others are also concerned about being mistaken for bad guys and attacked by security forces when they leave their town, because it has happened elsewhere in the state.

“We’ve practically been abandoned,” he said.

Cartel infighting triggered violence

Sheinbaum took office in October 2024, when Sinaloa was entering a new spiral of violence following the abduction of Sinaloa Cartel leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada by a son of former cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Zambada was handed over to U.S. authorities and his faction of the cartel went to war with the faction led by Guzmán’s sons.

Initially, residents of the state capital, Culiacan, were caught in the crossfire, but the conflict eventually extended statewide. U.S. President Donald Trump took office last year and designated the Sinaloa Cartel, among others, a foreign terrorist organization, upping the pressure on Sheinbaum’s administration to get tough with the cartels.

By last April, Vizsla Silver Corp., the Vancouver, Canada-based mine owner, announced it was halting activities at the mine because of security concerns in the area. The pause lasted a month.

García Harfuch said this month that the suspects arrested were part of the Sinaloa Cartel faction loyal to Guzmán’s sons, known as “los Chapitos,” and had mistaken the workers for belonging to the other faction. There has not been an explanation for how the confusion could have occurred since Vizsla said the workers were taken from their site.

Mines and crime

Mines, along with other businesses like avocado groves and pipelines carrying gasoline, have long attracted organized crime’s attention in Mexico as a source of extortion payments or to steal the extracted material.

Saucedo, who has researched cases in Guanajuato, Sinaloa and Sonora, said he has also seen cases where mines take advantage of armed groups to control mine opponents.

The Mexican government has said it has no reports that Vizsla was extorted. Sheinbaum said that her administration would talk with all mining companies in Mexico “to offer the support they require.”

Vizsla did not respond to questions emailed by The Associated Press, but has said in statements that its focus is on finding the remaining workers and supporting the affected families. Relatives of one of the workers declined to comment.

Search for the missing

In the community of El Verde, in the foothills that rise between the ocean and the mountains, Marisela Carrizales stood beside banners bearing the photographs of missing people. The road leading to a site where clandestine graves were discovered was blocked by a police car. The surrounding town was silent.

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“I’m here waiting for answers,” said Carrizales, who belongs to one of the many search collectives that have spread all over Mexico to look for the missing. She has been looking for her son, Alejandro, for 5 ½ years and had come to El Verde with more than 20 others also looking for missing relatives to monitor authorities’ work and demand that they help them look in other places, too. “We have information that there are a lot more graves here … we have to come to look for them.”

It was here in the first week of February that authorities found a clandestine grave and then more in the days that followed. The Attorney General’s office said 10 bodies were found in one location, five of which have been identified as the missing mine workers. But the Sinaloa state prosecutor’s office also said additional remains were found in four other grave sites around the community.

There are many missing. In Mazatlan, a Mexican tourist was taken from a bar in October. In January, a businessman disappeared. In February, six other Mexican tourists were abducted from a ritzy part of the resort city. A woman and a girl who were part of that group were later found alive outside the city, but the men who were with them have not appeared.

While the government has strengthened security in Mazatlan ahead of carnival celebrations, back in the mountains, teachers, doctors or even buses are not coming to many of the communities out of fear, Vargas said.

Labrador, the man from Chirimoyos, said that when he is lucky, he borrows a friend’s motorcycle to go to his job in a highway toll booth. When he can’t borrow it, he has to walk more than 5 miles through the mountains, because the person in charge of local public transportation disappeared in December.

Verza reported from Mexico City.

By MICHAEL CASEY

BOSTON (AP) — More than a decade before he became the country’s first president, George Washington was leading a critical campaign in the early days of the American Revolution. The Siege of Boston was his first campaign as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and, in many ways, set the stage for his military and political successes — celebrated on Presidents Day.

Following the Battles of Lexington and Concord, militias had pinned down the British in Boston in April 1775. The Continental Congress, recognizing the need for a more organized military effort, selected Washington to lead the newly formed army.

The Siege of Boston and its significance

On this day 250 years ago, Washington would have been nearing the end of an almost yearlong siege that bottled up as many as 11,000 British troops and hundreds more loyalists. The British were occupying Boston at the time, and the goal of the siege was to force them out.

A critical decision made by Washington was sending Henry Knox, a young bookseller, to Fort Ticonderoga in New York to retrieve dozens of cannons. The cannons, transported hundreds of miles in the dead of winter, were eventually used to fire on British positions. That contributed to the decision by the British, facing dwindling supplies, to abandon the city by boat on March 17, 1776.

Historians argue that the British abandoning their positions, celebrated in Boston as Evacuation Day, rid the city of loyalists at a critical time, denied the British access to an important port and gave patriots a huge morale boost.

“The success of the Siege of Boston gave new life and momentum to the Revolution,” Chris Beagan, the site manager at Longfellow House in Cambridge, a National Historic Site that served as Washington’s headquarters during the American Revolution. “Had it failed, royal control of New England would have continued, and the Continental Army likely would have dissolved.”

How the siege shaped Washington

The siege was also a critical test for Washington. A surveyor and farmer, Washington had been out of the military for nearly 20 years after commanding troops for the British during the French and Indian War. His successful campaign ensured Washington remained the commander-in-chief for the remainder of the revolution.

Doug Bradburn, president of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, said Washington took the first steps to creating a geographically diverse army that included militiamen from Massachusetts to Virginia and, by the end of the war, a fighting force with significant Black and Native American representation. It was the most integrated military until President Harry S. Truman’s desegregated the armed forces in 1948, he said.

Washington, a slave owner who depended on hundreds of slaves on his Mount Vernon estate, was initially opposed to admitting formerly enslaved and free Black soldiers into the army. But short of men, Washington came to realize “there are free Blacks who want to enlist and he needs them to keep the British from breaking out” during the siege, Bradburn said.

Ridding Boston of the British also turned Washington into one of the country’s most popular political figures.

“He comes to embody the cause in a time before you have a nation, before you have a Declaration of Independence, before you’re really sure what is the goal of this struggle,” Bradburn said. “He becomes the face of the revolutionary movement.”

Commanding the military for more than eight years also prepared Washington for the presidency, Pulitzer Prize-winning military historian Rick Atkinson said. “Perhaps most important, it gave him a sense that Americans could and should be a single people, rather than denizens of thirteen different entities.”

Myths of Washington

His rise to prominence also led to plenty of myths about Washington, many which persist to this day.

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One of the most popular is the cherry tree myth. It was invented by one of Washington’s first biographers, according to George Washington’s Mount Vernon, who created the story after his death. Supposedly, a 6-year-old Washington took an ax to a cherry tree and admitted as much when caught by his father, famously saying “I cannot tell a lie … I did cut it with my hatchet.”

The second one is the wooden teeth myth. It was rumored that Washington had wooden dentures and scholars, well into the 20th century, were quoted as saying his false teeth were made from wood. Not true. He never wore wooden dentures, instead using those with ivory, gold and even human teeth.

More than a statesman

During his lifetime, Washington had myriad pursuits. He was known as an innovative farmer, according to the George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and an advocate for Western expansion, buying up to 50,000 acres of land in several Mid-Atlantic states. After returning to Mount Vernon, he built a whiskey distillery that became one of the largest in the country.

His connection to slavery was complicated. He advocated for ending slavery, and his will called for freeing all the slaves he owned after the death of his wife, Martha Washington. But he didn’t own all the slaves at Mount Vernon so he couldn’t legally free all of them.

Celebrating Presidents Day

For fans of George Washington, Presidents Day is their Super Bowl. Originated to celebrate Washington’s birthday, which falls on Feb. 22, the holiday has become associated with good deals at the mall. Still, there are plenty of places celebrating all things Washington on this day.

There will be a wreath-laying ceremony at Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, and there will be a Continental Army encampment. There will be a parade honoring Washington in Alexandria, Virginia, and, in Laredo, Texas, a monthlong celebration features a carnival, pageants, an air show and jalapeno festival.