According to a Boston Globe article called “The Truth about Labor Day” published roughly a year ago, the holiday wasn’t originally supposed to be any fun.

“(President Grover Cleveland) and its sponsors intended it not as a celebration of leisure but as a promotion of the great American work ethic,” wrote Globe reporter Thaddeus Russell.

“Work, they believed, was the highest calling in life, and Labor Day was a reminder to get back to it. It was placed at the end of summer to declare an end to the season of indolence.”

So as you extend by three days your long stretch of summer indolence this holiday weekend, please take a moment to pretend to feel guilty about it.

Here are some ideas for Labor Day activities that require minimal pretending.

Festivals

•The Auburn Cord Duesenberg Festival, which looked for a while there as though it was about to go as extinct as its namesake automotive nameplates, is back and is happening now through Sept. 6 at various locales in and around Auburn.

A massive schedule can be found at www.acdfestival.org.

•The 18th annual Marshmallow Festival happens Friday through Sept. 7 in downtown Ligonier.

Events include marshmallow games, a marshmallow bake-off and a beauty pageant during which metaphors that employ the words “marshmallow” or “marshmallows” to describe physical attributes will presumably be avoided.

Information can be found at www.themarshmallowfestival.com.

Music

•The Tri-State Bluegrass Festival, which happens Thursday through Sept. 5 at the Noble County 4-H Fairgrounds in Kendallville, may be the cheapest way in the world to see 20 or so of the top musical acts in their field.

That field is bluegrass and, although that sounds like an attempt at agricultural humor, I tend to try to leave that sort of thing to Purdue master gardener Ricky Kemery.

Admission to the entire weekend of music is only $25. Call 260-918-4790.

•Paul “New” Stewart, the keyboardist who has turned a resemblance to Rod Stewart into a lengthy career in northeast Indiana as a genre-hopping soloist and accompanist, will perform throughout the last big holiday weekend at the Lake James nightspot known as Club Paradise, 3861 North Bay View Road in Angola.

Stewart will be joined by Brian Frushour and JJ McCoy. They’ll start performing at 10 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

•Finally, New Orleans-based Cajun and Zydeco band BeauSoliel will perform at 8:30 p.m. Friday at Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory as part of the Botanical Roots Series. Admission is $6 for patrons 13 and older.

The Foellinger-Freimann Botanical Conservatory is at 1100 S. Calhoun St.

Theater

•“The Laramie Project” is not a relaxing way to spend your Labor Day weekend, but it’s a rewarding way.

A production of the play, based on the 1998 murder of gay student Matthew Shepard, happens at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday at First Presbyterian Theater, 300 W. Wayne St.

Tickets, from $18 to $20, can be reserved by calling 422-6329.

Host a dessert buffet

Beach season is almost over, so Labor Day weekend is the perfect time to inaugurate sweatpants weather with a dessert buffet complete with dessert wines and coffee drinks.

Use it to guiltlessly say goodbye to your perfect beach body, or to celebrate the fact that you’ll soon have many more layers of clothing to hide your far-from-perfect, never-goes-near-a-beach body.

Buy tiki torches or find some place that uses tiki torches in a decorative motif

There is something about a tiki torch that makes me feel as if I’ve been instantly transported to some tropical locale.

Your heart may be more hardened to tiki torches.

Tropical locales have never been farther away from where most of us are, geographically and financially. But tiki torches cost less than $20 each and they’re available everywhere.

Light a tiki torch this weekend and pretend you’re in Maui before the snowfall wakes you from your reverie for good.

Go on an aimless drive

Several weekends back, I was on a non-urgent car ride toward western Ohio when I decided to take side trips to a few small towns I’d heard of but had never visited.

On one of these trips, I discovered an underground house (a house built into a hill) and was chased away by a large man wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt when I tried to take pictures of it.

Just think – I never would have seen that house, or been nearly beaten up for seeing it, if I hadn’t taken that detour.

Aimless family drives are just the thing to do on Labor Day weekend before that school-year regimen of firm and fixed driving sets in.

spen@jg.net