Assuming that your employer allowed you to take days off whenever it was traditional to do so which religion would you follow and which country would you live in to get the most days off work per year? For example, thinking of a Christian in the U.K. you would get every Sunday, Christmas and Easter etc from your religion and you would get Bank Holidays off work from the country. Of course people do work on these days but for the sake of the question we will assume that your boss is very sensitive to your needs and allows you to take time off whenever it is tradition to do so.
So where should I move to and who should I worship to avoid doing any work? Am I better off sticking in the U.K. and having the odd Monday off or moving to America where you have thanksgiving and President’s Day (I think that’s a holiday at least)?
Countries with lots of religious holidays and countries where you can fanny around at will are mutually exclusive. You’d be better off going to live in a country where you get lots of holiday as part of your job contract, which seems to exclude the US, where an annual 10 day holiday seems the norm (correct me if I’m wrong). In the UK it’s about 20-25 days, in the Netherlands it’s 30-35 days etc. Shop around.
Surely the countries don’t decide on how many religious holidays to have. If, for example, Buddhism turned out to offer the most religious holidays what would stop me from going to Holland, becoming a Buddhist and calling any boss that refuses to allow me to practice my religion (by preventing me from observing religious holidays) a racist?
I worked at a Jewish high school in South Africa, and there were a couple of Muslim teachers who had the sweetest deal - as a nominally christian country, all of the Christian holidays were also public holidays, as a new “reborn” country there were a slew of new public holidays, the school was closed on all the Jewish holidays, and they got their own religious holidays off as well…
India would have been your dream destination until a few years ago. You name the occasion, we had a holiday for it. IIRC, they added up to a couple of weeks worth of work days!
The government stepped in some years ago and cut the number of national holidays down to 5 or 6.