… and apparently you completely missed where I stated:
That does not eliminate other Jews feeling differently.
No qualifier has ever been noticed in the history of the Dope. There must be a pile of missing pixels the size of the Pacific garbage patch somewhere in another dimension.
OTOH, New Year’s Day is a federal holiday and Christmas Eve is not. Which pairs well with Christmas Day because for many it involves a big celebration on the night before the date.
Yes, and note we also have Thanksgiving as a Federal Holiday, which also has religious roots.
We used to go see a film on Christmas Day.
Note that Good Friday is a big deal , Christian religion-wise but it is not a Federal Holiday.
Not at a Federal Level, but iirc some states do have it as a Holiday.
Which prayer has been done by a Rabbi several times.
Religion-wise Christmas is third or fourth anyway, with Easter, Good Friday, Lent, Advent, Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Ascension Thursday, Annunciation, Pentecost, and Reformation Day all having more or less importance faith-wise. Christmas is not really a big religious holiday, it wasn’t even celebrated until Charlemagne made it a bid deal- so he could have a big holiday to celebrate the day he was crowned.
This kinda proves the Christmas in the USA is more secular- Israel has 9 or 10 religious Jewish holidays. If American wanted to have Christian holidays, there are about that many to pick from, but Christmas was picked as it is secular and more importantly SHOPPING!
Thanksgiving has as much (non-denominational) Christian roots as Christmas.
Note that quite a few localities in the USA have schools that close for Jewish holidays.
Don’t like 95% of the New Year’s Eve festivities take place in the evening/night? New Year’s Eve day isn’t really a thing. More likely, people would want off Jan 2nd if they had the chance.
If Christmas is truly a secular holiday and 100% about shopping they should change the name to Santamas and completely eliminate Christ from it. I’m sure that would be fine with conservative Christian communities.
Yeah, after many, many decades the Christians fought back on the elimination of the prayer by allowing other religious leaders to offer them. Were any of those religions fighting to mandate prayers or just angry they didn’t get a turn? That they still happen is a tribute to the power of Jesusism, not a sign of religious equality. How many minority religions have ever been invited?
The House, BTW, has had 61 chaplins, all of them Christians. (Don’t try to argue that Unitarian isn’t Christian.) The Senate has had 62, ditto.
Religious theocracy.
Cashmas.
Shopping
I think it is both. It is a secular nation in the sense that the government does not have an official religion, and it is a Christian nation in the sense that a pretty substantial majority of its citizens are Christian to some extent.
And the confluence of those two is that the not-religious federal government takes a religious holiday off because enough of their workers and constituents want to.
Christmas is the only federal holiday that is religious, but it’s far from the only religious holiday that aspects of the government recognize as existing in the real world. Government schools generally take Holy Week off too. But they sometimes call it “Spring Break”, so maybe it’s fine and not religious, even though it’s very definitely religious.
The 1870 law that established Christmas as a federal holiday also added New Years Day, the 4th of July, and Thanksgiving as holidays. At the time there wasn’t any real argument over whether or not it was appropriate for the government to officially recognize a “religious” holiday, probably because the government wasn’t forcing anyone to do anything religious. If you didn’t celebrate Christmas, you got a day off. That’s it. No biggie. The government wasn’t supporting Christmas, it was just saying that the office doors were closed that day, kinda like how a lot of businesses and schools are closed around here (southern PA) on the first day of hunting season. They aren’t closed to specifically support hunting, they just recognize that most folks aren’t going to be working that day anyway so might as well make it an official day off.
Many states already had Christmas holidays (though many did not), so giving folks the day off was already standard in a lot of places.
It’s also important to note that initially it wasn’t a paid holiday. Government workers were forced to take an unpaid day off up until 1938. Then it became a paid day off.
In Canada, Christmas is only a holiday federally to federally regulated workers (bank employees, interprovincial transport employees, telecommunication employees, etc) however it is not a holiday for provincially regulated employees, (store workers, restaurant workers, hospital workers and just about everyone else). They have to rely on provincial Employment Standards having proclaimed it a holiday although they all do.
Boxing Day is a holiday under the Canada labour code but only to the aforementioned federal employees. Most provincial jurisdictions don’t have Boxing Day by statute but many such employers have agreed to it in union collective bargaining agreements.
People keep saying that Christmas is a secular holiday and is all about gift-giving and related shopping. I didn’t think there were that many shopping malls in 1870, and Amazon was still working out the kinks in their pony express two-day home delivery service around that time.
Perhaps in 1870 Christians, who were in the majority, felt they deserved a day off to celebrate the birth of their Lord, or maybe it was a convenient day for a federal holiday because people were spending most of their day in Church and not working, as opposed to watching the Packers host the Browns and stuffing themselves as they do today. Closing all of the Government offices probably wasn’t that big a deal unless you happened to live in a major city.
What matters is that December 25th is known around the world as Christmas, the birthday of Jesus (even though it was just a reappropriation of the pagan holiday Saturnalia and Jesus was probably born sometime in the Spring). Since the US was a Christian majority country it made perfect sense to take off Jesus’ birthday. Nobody is arguing that.
The US was a Christian country before 1870 and continues to be one today. I don’t care that the US isn’t secular, just stop saying that it is. “InGod We Trust” was first added to our money in 1864, the words “Under God” were added to the pledge of allegiance in 1954. I’m okay with all that, let’s just not be hypocrites about it. The definition of secular is “Denoting attitudes, activities, or other things that have no religious or spiritual basis.” The US is far from secular.
Yes, the federal Boxing Day holiday only applies to about 10% of the national workforce. Ontario does have it, though, so that’s a big chunk of the work force that does get Boxing Day as a stat holiday.
It is not, and no one has claimed it is. Just mostly.
Can’t it be both, like the late Earl Warren?
“Bank Holiday” may not be a legal designation in the U.S., but I and everyone I’ve known uses the term. Most often heard around my office the week of Good Friday when people new to the company find out the stock market is closed and they invariably ask “is it a bank holiday?”.
Why are the markets closed on Good Friday, anyway (not that I’m complaining)? I understand that religion wise it’s an important day, but would people normally take it off to observe? And anyway. I thought the Jews have all the money(except this one) 
Interesting. Where are you? I’ve never heard it.
I’ve heard people say ‘the banks are closed for ’, but that’s not the same phrasing. I’ve been a bit puzzled by the phrase ‘bank holiday’ in books written in/about the UK, because it read to me as if only the banks were closed and everything else was open.
They’re mostly referred to in the US as three day weekends.