I find Easter Monday in the United States jarring.

Every.

Single.

Year.

This is a first-world problem. But then, it really is.

If you are a Christian, you just may have spent 40 days preparing for Easter Sunday — or, at least, longing for a conversion of heart, mind, soul, and action to take, so that you are truly living the life offered and mandated by God Himself. On Easter, you celebrate the most magnificent gift — the promise of redemption and eternal life, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which changes everything.

Hopefully, you had time with family and/or friends. Please, God, you had a moment or more of silence for prayer — miraculous as that may be. Maybe you hosted a gathering, which tends to require (again) prep and cleanup, and no small bit of physical and emotional exhaustion. And after getting the dishes done, you realize you have to prepare for work on Monday.

Wouldn’t it be divine to have a day to process? To get to Mass or Bible study in the morning and remember that Easter is about more than Peeps branded . . . everything . . . for sale.

Bill Buckley once wrote a column about his personal internal struggle as an employer about closing National Review on Good Friday — what if they have the day off, but employees don’t put it to good use?

But what if they do?

And it may say more about who we are simply because we’ve recognized that the day should be different.

Also: Who’s to say what the exact proper use of Good Friday or Easter Monday might be? I once went on a weekend retreat, started to listen to the priest preaching — a brilliant friend, as it happens, whom I always love listening to as he downloads wisdom and knowledge from prayer and his photographic memory (he actually gets a shout-out for other reasons in my syndicated column this week) — and realized I needed to sleep most in order to get to the prayer. Many churches will have a noon or evening Mass on Monday, too.

That’s all a long way of endorsing congressional efforts to institute an official holiday the day after Easter.

Thank you, Senator Schmitt.

Easter Monday is something Europeans tend to get right — however individuals wind up, in their freedom, using it.