I have never ever gone to school or worked anywhere that has given the Friday before Easter or the Monday after off as a holiday. And, frankly, the idea of getting Good Friday off is hard to wrap my mind around. Yet I know it does happen some places… how about you, do you get one or both off?
For purposes of the poll, having one or the other days “off” means it’s an official holiday offered to all employees/students. If you needed to take paid time off or a floating holiday to have them off, there’s an option for that too.
In Texas, Good Friday is almost always the inclement weather day . . .if it doesn’t snow earlier in the year, we get this day off. If we had a snow da, we don’t. The second snow day is usually the last day of the school year, but this year it was Easter Monday, which has made for a lovely 4 day weekend.
NYSE is closed on Good Friday, so (almost) anyone in the brokerage industry was off.
When I worked at a clearing broker, we had 8 regular holidays; these were simple, just tell the system that, the date of President’s Day or Memorial Day or ____ was a regular holiday & the system automagically extended trade settlement one extra business day, didn’t do money market sweeps, etc.
Then we had two “half-assed” holidays: Columbus Day & Veteran’s Day. We called them “half-assed” because the NYSE was open (so it could be a Trade Date) but the Fed was closed (so it couldn’t be a Settlement Date) & money markets didn’t sweep that day, either. Therefore, we had to pull out a special binder-sized checklist & go into individual programs & turn just certain ones off from running & then turn them back on the next day.
Good Friday was the opposite, the Fed/banks are open but the NYSE is closed. We called Good Friday a “Reverse half-assed holiday” because it was the opposite of the other two special days. It wasn’t a trading day, but we had to do certain settlements. We had a different, thinner checklist of programs that needed to be turned off for that day. I was the only employee (out of 500+) that worked Good Friday. I used to have one of the clerks do it but realized I could come in for 1-1½ hours & then get a full comp day to use at my leisure (& I is S-M-R-T :D).
As for the chillins, public schools around here are all closed the week leading up to Easter (unless there was lots of snow days or a teacher’s strike earlier in the year & they needed to make up some days, then the beginning of last week was in school. & only Thurs/Fri were off for an abbreviated Spring Break.)
Both of us are self-employed atheists. Not only did we not take Friday or today off, we worked the intervening two days as well. We did color some Easter eggs, though.
I teach in a university that didn’t have any days off, but my son goes to public-school kindergarten next door, and he had Thursday, Friday, and Monday off. Partly a legacy of the higher-than-average Catholic population in this town (especially historically), and partly to build in some slack in case of excessive snow days. I suppose you could call a five-day weekend a “Spring Break,” but for the purposes of this poll, I didn’t.
In Canada, with the exception of Quebec, Good Friday is a stat holiday and almost all nonessential businesses are closed, though many service sector businesses remain open. Instead, Quebec tends to observe Easter Monday as their stat holiday.
I work in four different school districts. All of them had both Friday and all of this week off. This week is Spring Break; some districts called Friday part of Spring Break too, and some called it some other name (not Good Friday). I don’t think the kids cared what it was called.
It does bother me a little that public schools recognize what’s so obviously a religious holiday. It’s not like with Christmas, where you can say “School will be out from December 20 through December 28”, or whatever, which just coincidentally happens to include December 25 which just happens to be Christmas: Easter (and consequently Good Friday) is calculated in such a convoluted way that there’s no other way to say it than “The Friday before Easter”.
In Maine, and Mass, the third Monday of April is Patriot’s Day, and most schools are closed for the day. My college had the day off today, but my courses are online so it doesn’t mean much to me.
Patriot’s Day honors the Revolutionary War battles of Concord and Lexington, it is completly unrelated to Easter.
I went to a Catholic school. We didn’t have classes on Good Friday, but we had to attend the service. And when I say “had to” I mean we had to wear our uniforms, sit in our class’ assigned rows and the teachers took attendance.
In the 1980s I worked on a video with a producer in New York City. He warned me to take Easter into account, because the Italian craftpeople would take Good Friday off, the Jewish craftpeople would take Passover off, and between the two it was easier just to close the studio entirely rather than try to work around them.
Here in New Zealand, both Good Friday and Easter Monday are statutory holidays.
Traditionally, the Tuesday would also be a school holiday, but since a shift to 4-Term school years, Easter is usually integrated into a 2 week school term break, and the Easter Tuesday has limited applicability.
This year, Easter has led into the school term break - I worked Good Friday and have used the extra day PTO to take the Tuesday off with my wife (who works school terms).
I run a small business and we never think to ask our handful of clients what their schedules are, so on days like Good Friday I just sort of keep an eye on email between naps and fucking around with other stuff.
I didn’t realize that schools had off Monday, so I didn’t plan to have today off work. We had emails from our clients by 10 AM so it turned out to be a work day.
I voted that “my” kids had off school, not part of spring break. But I meant my nieces.
I work in an administrative office adjacent to one of my company’s manufacturing plants. The union at the plant gets Good Friday off. Corporate employees like me don’t get Good Friday, but we do get an extra floating holiday that the union doesn’t get that each person can take anytime during the year.
Here in the Bible Belt, most schools (including my kids’) are closed on G.F. This year they also had off today, but I think it was for a teacher’s training day.
I worked for two companies in a row that were headquartered in New York City and those companies always gave it as a holiday. During part of that time my husband also worked for a company HQ’d in NYC and he also got the day off. (Which seems peculiar to me because I thought every damn person in NYC was Jewish–Lenny Bruce said so–but there you go.)
During these blissful years, our kids did NOT have the day off*. Now that’s a holiday! Columbus Day was another one that we had off and our kids were in school.
*Except once, when it fell during spring break. But now, apparently, they do take it off.
It’s a practical thing: if a lot kids are going to miss (and a lot of Catholics do go to Mass on Good Friday), you lose a ton of attendance based funding. Funding doesn’t care if an absence is excused. It also leads to a wasted day-it’s hard to teach a lesson that a quarter of the kids can miss and still participate in class the next day. Better to go a day longer in June.
Oddly, this is more common in (secular) Europe than in the (religious) USA. I’ve never worked at a job where we got GF off. When I was doing business in Europe, it was very common. Probably more an issue of tradition than anything else-- like the “established Churches” in some European countries that would be anathema in the US.
