November 06, 2004

How important is a national holiday? Germany recently defeated a measure to move Reunification Day to a Sunday. How important a decision is this?

How much of a national identity is tied to holidays? Especially for a nation that attained this official status so recently? A nice cartoon puts it in some perspective: Legistlation puts Christmas and Easter together.

posted by patita 20 years ago
  • National holidays can be critical components of national identities, and more importantly, national values. The way a holiday is implemented is tied directly to the importance a country places on the values expressed by that day-of-recognition. Sometimes a holiday might be moved to a weekend to ensure that it's values are expressed. Thus Thanksgiving is tied to a weekend in Canada partially in order to ensure the flexibility that families can get together over the long weekend. However, in the case of German Unification Day the move appears solely to ensure that a working day would never be missed. In other words, the move was saying that the values of Unification Day were never worth missing a day of work. The values would never be worth the emphasis provided by stopping work for a day. So, what were the values of Unification Day worth? Personally, I'm very wary of the kind of blind, dangerous jingoism that might be expressed in any national holiday based solely on national unity and strength. However, I'm very much a fan of values tied to the defeat of totalitarianism, such as were expressed by the fall of the East German government. Those are well worth missing to day of work to recognize and emphasize.
  • National holidays should only be rigidly fixed if most people use them as a guideline for booking their time off work.
  • I think that holidays that commemorate a specific event on a specific day should remain on that day. The only (major holiday) exception I can think of is Thanksgiving. The US has labor day first monday of September, memorial day last monday of May, but these aren't specific commemorations of specific major events. Independence day and Christmas are the days they intend to commemorate (I know the "first" Christmas was probably not in December, but I digress). I think it's great that Reunification day remains on exactly the day that it was.
  • I agree with chimaera, and I'd add: For the love of ghod in the US could we please add some? Especially in the period between Mid Feb's "President's Day" and Latelate May's "Memorial Day?" That's a long goddamn time to go without a day off. I know I know, productivity, blah blah - but for those of us in software testing the ONLY excuse that buys off senior manglement is: "Oh that's November, there's two holidays in there... nothing will get done..." Half the time, the fockers wanna do a "conversion" over one of those. I'd like to convert some of them to Soylent Green, just sayin'. Japan has a 'Respect for the Aged Day' - nothing wrong with that I say midway between Pres Day and Memorial Day would be just lovely.
  • amen, one olive.