It seems that in the past 20 years or so, quite a few new holidays have been added to the calendar. Currently, I average about 2 holidays per month, usually one national and one state.
If we keep adding holidays, won’t all workdays eventually be eliminated? What’s stopping people from adding more holidays?
Money, for one thing, if you’re talking about paid holidays. There’s generally resistance at some level to funding paid days off, whether in a state legislature or in Congress. Even giving private employees a day off can cost money that a business must justify in its budget. In most businesses, the practice is to give employees a few personal days off that they can schedule at any time of the year.
Yeah, I note that very few places get a paid Columbus Day off, anymore. Perhaps that is due to increased celebration of MLK day and/or other holidays I may have forgotten about?
So every day could be a holiday (thanks Dandy!) but only a fixed number of them might be paid holidays from employers.
Where are you located? Do you work for the private sector or the public sector? If the latter, do you work for a local, state, or federal agency?
Assuming we are talking about the U.S…
On the contrary, it seems like the number of holidays has remained fairly static. For example, for the federal government, while holidays such as Martin Luther King, Jr. Day have been added, others have been eliminated, such as combining Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday into Presidents’ Day.
Also, particularly in the private sector, there has been a trend in recent years to NOT give employees the day off for holidays considered to be less important, regardless of whether or not they are a federal holiday. For example, my last company did not give the day off for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Columbus Day, or Veterans Day.
In my experience, local and state employees get the most days off, because they generally get all of the state holidays off, and the state holidays generally include all of the federal holidays as well as state-specific holidays such as Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts. Local and state employees also sometimes get religious holidays off such as Good Friday.
Federal employees only get the federal holidays off. They never get state holidays off, in my experience.
And private-sector employees generally get the fewest days off.
No, Columbus Day was usually a school holiday in K-12, but not in college or the workplace. Back when i was in college in 1970, I was surprised that we had classes on Columbus Day and I’ve never worked in a job that had it off.
Columbus Day is still a Federal Holiday and a holiday in many states, which only means Federal or state workers get the day off. But it’s not a retail holiday and places like the New York Stock Exchange* don’t take it off.
*Those who argue that that Jews run the economy should ponder the fact that the NYSE celebrates Good Friday but neither Rosh Hashona nor Yom Kippur. 
What’s annoying for me personally is that I get Columbus Day off but not Veterans Day, while for my wife it’s the opposite. So there are two holidays that we can’t do anything because the other has to work.
Some companies that don’t want to give paid time off for all of the federal holidays and/or local or religious holidays give each employee the option of taking 1 or 2 “floating” holidays per year. At a company I worked at, an employee might be able to choose to take off two of the following, for example: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Presidents’ Day, Good Friday, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Columbus Day, & Veterans Day. This was a typical list per year–the actual holidays on the floater list depended on the day of the week they fell on. The number of fixed holidays that HR picked for the year determined whether employees were given 1 or more floating holidays for the year. (For instance, if Christmas happened to fall on a weekend day that year, we’d get one extra floating holiday.) It worked out such that everybody always got 10 holidays per year, every year.
If your company and your wife’s company both followed this practice, you could both choose to take the same day off.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day is the only federal holiday which has been added to the calendar in quite a long time (certainly in the last 25-30 years). In what state do you live? What other holidays have been added recently there?
Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been married 35 years, but I’d look at it as one holiday when I could do anything I wanted.
There was at least one attempt in Congress in 1983 to limit the number of federal holidays to ten. The current law, 5 U.S.C. 6103, defines the ten federal holidays but the specific law does not place a limitation on the total number.
Unfortunately (?), the only thing I really like to do on those three-day weekends is to go out of town on a little trip, and I can’t do that (or at least I don’t want to do that) if I can’t go with my wife.
Otherwise I just waste it sleeping in all day.