It’s 5.00pm on Maundy Thursday and everyone’s winding down for the Easter long weekend. We get both tomorrow (Good Friday) and Easter Monday off as public holidays. I’m going to be spending most of Easter singing with the church choir.
Is the four day break for Easter common in other countries too, or is it peculiar to Australia and New Zealand?
It’s not even a three day weekend here - just the normal Saturday and Sunday.
I miss the good old days when I lived in Germany and almost everybody had Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday off.
Here in the US, you are lucky if they let you out an hour earlier on Friday.
(I am taking Monday off, but not getting paid for it.)
FIVE days. Thursday, Friday, and Monday, we get no newspapers, no stores are open, nothing. And the kids are off school the whole week before Easter, and the Monday after, and oh yeah, while we’re at it, we’ll add a teachers’ in-service day on Tuesday, meaning they get seven school days off.
I’m finding all of this just a bit excessive. If the majority of Norwegians actually cared about Christianity when it wasn’t giving them the day off work or an excuse to party, I might be a little more tolerant…
Being now part of an atheistic communist country, in Hong Kong we naturally get three public holidays - Friday, Saturday (officially a work day still - I have to work alternate Sat mornings) and Monday - to celebrate the fact that nothing will change in Hong Kong for 50 years after the handover (oops - I mean reunification with the motherland). Nothing except the Basic Law itself, which they keep reinterpreting.
I’m off to Macau for three days to gorge myself on fine wines and Macanese cooking. Will be thinking of y’all.
Here in the UK, we similarly get Good Friday and Easter Monday off. I’m not sure whether Saturday or Sunday is a holiday for those who work weekends.
I’m off to Charmonix to ski, huzzah!
Some factory workers work Good Friday, but get Monday and Tuesday off.
I’ve never been able to work out why Monday is a public holiday. Good Friday I can understand, although not so much these days in our increasingly secular society but Monday? As far as I’m aware there’s no such day as ‘Easter Monday’ in the liturgical calender.
In Ireland we get Good Friday and Easter Monday off.
As Easter is so early this year, that’s 3 consecutive short weeks for us; last week - day off for St Patrick’s Day, a day off for Good Friday this week and a day off for Easter Monday next week.
It’ll be a pain in the neck to have to get used to those pesky five day weeks again!!
I’ve always assumed that we get Easter Monday off because it’s a great excuse to have an *even longer * weekend.
Liturgically speaking though, all of the days in the Octave of Easter, right up until Low Sunday (the Sunday after Easter Sunday) are days of the highest rank in the liturgical calendar (1st class).
In Spain the Easter vacations vary by area.
Half the country gets Monday off but not Thursday (and kids are off from Saturday before Holy Week to Easter Monday), half gets Thursday but not Monday (and kids are off starting at noon on Holy Wednesday, until the Sunday after Easter).
In the UK Civil Service, it was always customary to take a half day on Maundy Thursday as well (presumably so that you could scoot off to Windsor or wherever to pick up your 10 pence from HM the K or Q). More recently, the half day simply became part of your annual leave entitlement and staff were more likely to take it whenever they wanted.
When I first started in the Trade Mark Registry in Holborn in 1988, the custom on Maundy Thursday was for everyone to zoom off down the pub [usually the Red Lion] bang on 12.00 and stay there until closing time (3 o’clock). When the Patent Office ffice relocated to Newport, the tradition was upheld to the extent that a “fun run” was instigated from the office to the nearest boozer - which, by then, was open all day.
Off licenses do amazing business over here today.
Good Friday is a “dry” day. All pubs, Off licenses etc. close. No alcohol can legally be sold.
Because of that it’s the biggest drinking day of the year. Everybody stocks up on the Thursday and has a right good session on the Friday.
I’ve always found in strange that Good Friday isn’t a holiday on some of the ‘more catholic’ countries where I’ve worked, this is from memory but IIRC despite the fact that Easter day is as important a festival as Christmas I’m sure we worked on Good Friday in Poland, Italy too, and in secular France, despite having other ‘religious’ holidays such as All Saints’ and Assumption, we’ll be working tomorrow.
(I think that technically there is some sort of difference between the Good Friday and Easter Monday holidays in the UK. One is a bank holiday and one is a ‘custom’ or seomthing ? )
Neither Good Friday nor Easter Monday are public (national) holidays in the US. I have worked for agencies that had Good Friday as a holiday but that was in the private sector. Here, we don’t have tomorrow off nor Monday off. Matter of fact I have to work at a fund raiser Saturday. Since this particular fund raiser is always held on the last Saturday in March, doesn’t matter if it’s Holy Saturday or not. I could refuse for religious reasons not to work it but it’s just not that big of a deal for me.
They said they’ll let us out a full two hours early on Friday, “if there’s no work to be done.”
What ticks me off is the library is closed for all three days, and the laundromat is closed on Sunday, so I have to squeeze all my errands into Saturday, when it’s supposed to rain.
Up here in Canada, I get a four day weekend. Not sure if its a national thing, or just a school thing.
My SO gets tomorrow off, but not Monday. I never heard of having Monday off. When I was in school I normally got Good Friday, as I remember.
Either way, yay for three day weekends!
Both the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ always close on Good Friday, which makes me wonder why more businesses don’t take it off.
My company usually follows the Stock Exchange’s holiday schedule but for some reason they don’t with Good Friday. They probably won’t even let us (the workers) out early. This is because the principals (the majority of the company) just leave anyway and “forget” to tell the rest of us that we can leave too. Then on Monday, someone will say, “Oh, didn’t you know you could leave??”
Oh yeah, I just come and go as I please. :rolleyes:
Our kids don’t get Easter Break, Og forbid the public schools call it what it’s always been called, it’s Spring break. Christmas is Winter Break and inbetween they have Mid-Winter break, imaginative eh?
Whatever it’s called, they have the week following Easter off school. I work in a union factory, we get the 4 day weekend.