Suppose you want every day to be a holiday. To fulfill your dream you can travel around the world. You can take up to a 3-day holiday, like Japan’s 3-day New Year, but not the 12 days of Christmas. You can also count Sunday or equivalent day of rest as a holiday. Can it be done? What is the longest holiday stretch possible?
How are we defining holiday? Does it have to be a national holiday, or does any can any little town’s harvest festival count? Do people have to get the day off work for it to count?
If it could be done, I imagine you’d still have to recalculate for every year, since so many religious holidays – Hindu, Muslim, etc – run on a lunar calendar.
It seems harder to find a day that is not some sort of holiday, particularly if you go back to the root word: holy days. Just taking saints’ feast days from the Catholic Church gets you the entire year:
http://www.americancatholic.org/Features/saints/bydate.asp?SODmonth=Mar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_of_Saints
There are times when you do not celebrate saints’ days, such as holy week, but that is another sort of holy day. Somewhere some group will be celebrating most saints at least as ardently as Americans celebrate St. Patrick.
Can you celebrate all the obscure little patron saints’ days for various towns?
If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work.
Or so I’ve heard. I’m not sure, myself.
As far as a single holiday goes, I think Hanukkah has that pretty well wrapped up in terms of duration.
For trying to go through the calendar… well, the fact that many countries do not use the Gregorian calendar for their holidays makes it extremely difficult to iron out dates for them. One could probably get a pretty good stretch going, but I doubt that, without resorting to Catholic saint days, one could go year-round with relatively official holidays.
The answer is simple. Go to Spain. Nobody has a full count of the local holidays that are observed, but there is an official figure of over 25,000.
Sad really. We had a project to find a route through Spain such that we could spend every day of the year at a fiesta (counting only those that are observed as holidays by the local administration). The number of such routes turned out to be beyond our ability to compute.
Some interesting stats on holidays (and a good working definition of a holiday) per nation can be found at: http://www.financialcalendar.com/freestuff/country.htm
Poor Bosnia, “where residents sometimes have to go 731 days without a holiday.”
Alex- on http://www.financialcalendar.com/freestuff/patterns.htm they show significant cyclical variation in global average number of holidays per year (we’re at the peak, so this is the best year for holidays for a while).
The website (obviously waiting to be posted to an economics blog) wonders “Should GNP be higher in years when there are more working days? Not being economists, we’re not qualified to answer that question. However, we can point out that the effect is very significant in some years. For example, in 2032 there will be 0.9% more working days than in 2031 (see chart below) [editor's note: to see the chart visit the site- it's pretty neat].”
To get halfway to living the aforementioned dream, become a diplomat and get posted to a country with a different religious tradition than your own. This was told to me by a Low Countries (geography blurred to to protect the, uh?) diplomat recalling his posting in Israel: he got both Jewish and Catholic holidays off. Given that he told me this over over a long lunch in a bar, means that the rest of the year not covered by Judeo-Christianly sanctioned slacking is, well, not really an issue.
Plus, free parking and duty-free cigs.
sorry, my last comment kind of got eaten.
i meant to say go over to the aristocrats and celebrate zappadan…
the rest is correct.
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