Why, because working people don’t deserve a day off?
Do they work every waking hour?
A 24 year old step daughter. But I’m not so much thinking busy as unpredictable. September and October are, in my experience, especially predictable and routine months. They may be busy, but it’s not the kind of busy or chaos caused by colleagues being out on vacation, a lack of routine events, or unpredictable events suddenly popping up. I recall things like every Tuesday after school my daughter has to be at some sort of practice, or every Thursday morning she has to get to school 30 minutes early because of whatever activity the school does on Thursday morning, that type of stuff. I enjoy and thrive on that kind of busy, because it’s routine.
Summer, however, tends to be filled with chaos of the sort like “we were planning to relax at home this weekend, but wait, we just saw this event happening out of town a 3 hour drive away, so let’s go do that and spend the night out of town as well, won’t that be fun?” That kind of stuff happening on an unpredictable and inconsistent basis saps my mental energy.
Valid. Why not in January or February? Things always look so bleak to me after the holidays. Just an endless stretch of Winter with nothing to look forward to until Spring. They need to break it up more.
People just really like Having An Excuse.
This conversation really reminds me of Oktoberfest. Notably it started as wedding celebration and is now officially “a celebration of Bavarian culture”, but it’s really an excuse to drink and party.
It started as a huge festival on a Prince’s wedding day, they all had so much fun they did it again the next year, then every year or two after that, getting more elaborate over time, moved it to October for better weather, started being imitated across the world under the same name…an interesting example of a holiday evolving into existence. But it does demonstrate that people really want some sort of excuse for their festivals, even if they barely pretend it’s anything but an excuse.
Heh. If an alien 
came to Earth and learned how chocolate rabbit ears came to be in stores in the spring, he’d order the invasion fleet to attack immediately.
businesses find all possible excuses to copy whatever - as long as money can be made …
think: Haloween in countries where this was never a thing … (mostly driven by sweets-stuff companies)
….or videogame companies…
I’m going to challenge your basic premise here.
For at least the past several decades, I feel like much of the backstory behind Thanksgiving has been downplayed. I almost never see traditional Thanksgiving decorations besides maybe the occasional turkey (no Pilgrim hats or Indigenous American stuff). It’s mostly become a holiday about eating a big meal and watching football with family.
Similarly, as an agnostic Jew raised in a mixed-religion home, Christmas to me seems more about a several months of red and green lights, trees, ribbons, and whatnot culminating in an orgy of gift-giving.
I honestly don’t have a problem with the various characters associated with the holiday - Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, Elves, Grinches, Scooges, Belsnickels in the case of my eastern PA in-laws.
I mean collectively, no, it doesn’t really make any sense in terms of any sort of cohesive narrative that has anything to do with the birth of Christ.
Easter is mostly a children’s holiday where they eat candy. Same comments regarding the Easter Bunny.
That’s sort of what I’m saying. Christmas is really about all that stuff and not really about what it’s supposed to be about. And also I think that’s okay. Despite the rampant commercialization, which I think is really no worse than America in any other time of year, there are also some nice nudges toward charity and goodwill which are virtually absent in our culture during other times of year. So even if Christmas is just the trappings of Christmas, devoid of deeper meaning, it’s okay. It’s fine to want some time off work to open gifts and see your family and occasionally think about becoming a nicer person.
I was watching the Charlie Brown Christmas special for the first time in several years, and it struck me how cerebral and not really targeted at children it was. But Charlie Brown is functionally a wet blanket the whole time (I realize that’s his thing.) He’s freaking out about his dog joining a Christmas decorating contest and kids dancing to upbeat music. That’s what Christmas is, man. It’s at least as much about commercialism and revelry as it is about the birth of Christ, and for people like me it’s not about Christ at all. But I don’t think most people or even most Christians meditate much on the birth of Christ during this hallowed season. It’s not really a time of sober reflection, is it?
Most of it is stuff that is really tied to non-Christian festivals and ceremonies, and the Church co-opted it (syncretism) and made it their own. People may say that Christian holidays don’t line up with the old Roman/Celtic/Germanic/whatever ones, but they certainly come close. There’s no good reason to celebrate Christmas right near the winter solstice, or celebrate All Saints Day right near Samhain, or Easter very close to the vernal equinox, except to steal pagan thunder by co-opting their festivals and what-not as Christian.
It’s kind of weird living in another culture with completely different holidays and traditions.
Now it’s in New Year’s which was traditionally three days but now people have more days off.
They eat certain traditional foods and do particular things including getting together with relatives.
It’s kind of like of like watching from the sidelines.
This year, the Japanese tradition of eating KFC for Christmas featured in most dinner talk in the US over the holidays.
Yeah, that’s a big custom here.
The Easter Bunny and the Easter Eggs also have pagan roots. Germanic people used to celebrate a spring holiday devoted to the pagan goddess of fertility, Ostara, and of course both bunnies and eggs are symbols of fertility, hence the customs. What’s striking and ironic is the fact that the highest Christian feast, the resurrection of Christ, is still called after that pagan goddess in English and German (Ostern).
I may have this wrong, but I thought it comes from the Old English word for April which in turn comes from the goddess. If true, than the word is no more directly related to a pagan deity than Good Friday (from Frigga).
And that’s the Germanic spelling. The Anglo-Saxon spelling, Eostre, is even closer to ‘Easter’.
I have long found it interesting that several of our big Western holidays are adopted from, or supplanted, Pagan holidays and traditions. Easter, Christmas supplanting Saturnalia, and then there’s Halloween, which is a secular holiday loosely evolved from Samhain, but closely connected to All Saint’s day on November 1 (Halloween being an abbreviation of ‘Hallowed Evening’). I suspect, without bothering to do any research, that early Christian leaders created the ‘All Saints’ feast day to supplant any lingering Pagan celebrations of the Fall Equinox, similar to Christmas supplanting Saturnalia, but All Saints Day never really ‘took’ as a widely decorated, celebrated holiday in the West the way Christmas and Easter did.
It makes me wonder- we have Western, Christian holidays superimposed over both Equinoxes and the Winter Solstice. I’m surprised we have no big Christian / Western holiday equivalent to the Pagan Summer Solstice celebrations. You’d think that would be a big one.
Saint John’s Eve is what you are looking for. Wikilink. You may notice in the link that the tradition is particularly relevant in the Mediterranean and in Nordic countries – for different historical reasons. In the USA it is not much celebrated, the entry is short:
Historically, this date has been venerated in the practice of Louisiana Voodoo. The famous Voodoo priestess Marie Laveau was said to have held ceremonies on the Bayou St. John, in New Orleans, commemorating St John’s Eve. Many New Orleans residents still keep the tradition alive.
Yep, that is all.
Not in Spain. Santa Claus was never celebrated there, the Three Magus Kings were the present bringers, and only after Christmas, on January 6th (that is in two day’s time! Spanish kids have not had their presents yet! Because presents have nothing to do with X-Mas and are only an after-thought).
Well, nowadays, as @Al128 rightly remarked, there is a tendency to make everything into a consumerist heathen holiday and we are told to celebrate Halloween (what the fuck is that? Didn’t we use to go to the cemetery to remember our ancestors this day?) and carve Pumpkins (seriously?!?!?), drink Coca Cola to Santa Claus’ health, Black Friday (I have forgotten which saint this one is dedicated to, was it Saint Mammon?), Harry Potter and other incongruous customs, all in the name of Hollywood.
I am fortunate I have no kids I have to explain this aberrations to, only the dopey yankee dopers to enlighten. Glad to give you an opportunity to nitpick back. 
Cinco de Mayo and St. Patrick’s Day… reasons to get shitfaced and Act Ass.
I always thought Friday came from Norse god Freyr?