holidays: who needs 'em?

I have long thought that most holidays were overhyped and more or less a useless day off. In general, holidays come and go for me, without any special meaning or advance thinking/planning attached save for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and occasionally Easter. In some ways I'd actually prefer to see them given less emphasis, or at least less formal/institutional emphasis. Now there are surely some good reasons for them as well, such as a need for days of remembrance of some sort, especially in this day and age in which the powers that be are constantly trying to forget, reshape, or rewrite the past to suit their silly utopian aims. Also, I'm sure they hold some sentimental or traditional value for folks who always gather with family or otherwise do the same thing year to year on specific holiday weekends. But these aren't things that necessitate mandated days off for so much of the population. I'm convinced life would be better if we didn't have these periodic common days off.

For one, paid holidays on a job aren't much good except for creating a forced vacation day. And for me, not getting paid holidays now means they're only a forced day off and nothing more. In other words, in my world of work they're a detriment in that they force me to work around them in ways that might interfere with other plans. Now I'm not saying that the paid time off that comes with holidays should be eliminated altogether, but rather that it shouldn't be tied to specific days on the calendar.

Think about it. Rather than 15 vacation days and 10 holidays per year (for those lucky enough to actually get 10 holidays, i.e. those working for the gummint), who wouldn't want 25 vacation days instead? If you would rather have the holidays off, assign 10 of your leave days to holidays and call it done. The whole holiday concept strikes me as a holdover from a past era in which hourly workers were forced to work extremely long hours and weeks year-round such that periodic days off were the only way to ensure they got a few extra breaks here and there, but my knowledge of history is insufficient to back up that claim. In any case, I don't see that being the case for a lot of folks today, and where it is an issue there are much better ways to work around it than just assigning everybody the same off days.

This might create some headaches for employers in that they now have more time off scattered throughout the year that they have to plan around instead of having everyone off on common days, but this would be at least partially offset by the added flexibility and savings for holiday pay. For example, many employers have to pay extra for holiday work hours. My former employer had even taken several holidays off of its "official" calendar, such that I had 19 days of vacation per year instead of 15, for the primary purpose of having a more flexible and less expensive operating calendar. I wish they had just done the same with the rest of the holidays on the books. And for others, the idea of losing entire workgroups for an extra day one week brings on another set of problems that must be resolved in advance. Just because people aren't at work doesn't mean the world stops or project demands and requirements get put on hold.

This leads into another strike against the holiday calendar. The main reason I'd rather not have specific holidays off is that it's harder to do anything on those days. Why? Because everyone else wants to do something. Weekends are bad enough as it is. Holiday weekends? Forget it, not worth the hassle and extra cost to attempt much of anything. For some unfounded reason unknown to me, people all want to get out and do their fun stuff on holiday weekends despite the huge added burden of overcrowding and the delays and hassles that come with it. So most holidays on my calendar are basically "dead days" on which it's not worth the trouble to do anything except stay at home or work because dealing with all the special-outing types is just too cumbersome. And I know from discussions at my old workplace that I'm far from the only person with this mindset.

Case in point: here it is, Independence Day evening, and I'm doing...what? Sitting at home pecking at a keyboard. I'd rather be downtown watching some fireworks, listening to music, wandering around, or otherwise occupying myself with entertaining activities, but today is off the list of good days to do stuff on. The drawbacks of the crowds (especially the slow, gawking, oblivious type crowds--grrr) outweigh any benefits to be had by doing something cool. I wouldn't dream of going to Cape Cod or attending special events downtown today or tomorrow just due to the inevitable logistical nightmare it would quickly turn into. Again, most holidays are similar for me, and my only consistent travel day over the past few years has been Thanksgiving, and only then because I wanted to make at least one trip home and figured a weekend with two mandatory vacation days piled up against it was too long to do nothing but not a good candidate to plan anything for due to it being a holiday weekend. In other words, I'd have rather had those days off to spend some other time on a trip home over a non-holiday weekend.

Wouldn't it be so much easier if we all had that paid day off to assign to whatever Friday or Monday we wanted it to be on? Wouldn't this be better for the tourism industry because there would be more people out on off-weekends and crowds would be more balanced? Wouldn't families rather be able to get together on their own schedules instead of trying to beat the crowds at parks, campgrounds, hotels, events, whatever? Sure seems to me that the solution here is obvious: more vacation days and less holidays equals more freedom. And freedom is good.

There's another way holidays cause trouble: a lot of regular places of business or closed. Admittedly that's a selfish reason, but wouldn't more businesses choose to stay open if this were a regular day? Again, it'd bring more flexibility, as discussed above. And if stores want to close anyway due to the day of remembrance then they can do so. But I'm guessing most wouldn't if so many other workplaces weren't closed to begin with.

This one is particularly fresh on my mind because I just went out to grab some grub. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I don't usually pay much attention to holidays, and this includes at times forgetting that the present day is even a holiday--as was the case today. Well, my memory was jogged when I noticed on my way to the mall that there were very few cars parked anywhere. And when I got to the mall, it was closed. I am 99% sure this is the first time in my life I've been to a mall and found the doors locked. Not that I go to malls often enough to be an authority on such matters--they're entirely useless and dreadful except for the food court, which itself is very handy when you're hungry for a dinner other than soup or boxed food but can't decide what to go for--but I was quite shocked to actually discover one closed; until a couple of hours ago I would have sworn those things never closed early on any day of the year. Thankfully, the trusty D'Angelo sub shop that I frequent every weekend was open and willing to help a hungry guy out, so the story had a good ending. But still, there was some unexpected and unplanned-for trouble there that can be attributed to the holiday schedule.

Of course, as I said before, not everybody values the lesser holidays (i.e. those not directly inspired by Christianity, sorry to any trendy types out there but them's the facts) as little as I do. I'm sure for some folks, those days mean family reunions or special outings or parties with friends or what-have-you. In my case, I really didn't grow up with all that so it's never been a big deal. A holiday was a day off of school or a chance to stay up late, then it became a chance to make a quick trip home and/or catch up on sleep--and on rare occasions, studies--during college, then it turned into the equivalent of a forced vacation day, and now it's only a day off without pay. Okay, I remember doing family reunions every now and then back in the day, but those were often as much chaos as enjoyment, with me, being the introvert I always was, seeking solitude or time with one or two folks whenever and wherever I could find it. And those reunions were infrequent anyway. The point is, they were far from a tradition that was kept every year and that I'd feel obligated to keep up with.

This kinda brings up another drawback of getting rid of holidays. For schools, it's almost a necessity for days off to be coordinated among all students. But there's an easy remedy to that for children: homeschool or send kids to private schools which offer more flexibility and resemble more an institution of learning than a day care and indoctrination compound. That's far from the only or most significant advantage of homeschooling or private schooling, but that's another topic for another day. And in college, how many professors actually decreased their courseload to account for holidays? If you had the ones I had, not a lot. More often, it just resulted in more being crammed in during the prior and following weeks to make up for the lost class time. So why not just keep the class schedule normal? If students want a weekend off then they can skip class for a couple of days anyway.

The bottom line is, there are a lot of reasons a holiday-free calendar would be easier for all of us. And it'd probably be more meaningful too, with folks getting to spend those days how they want and thus having more options to actually do what they want. The drawbacks that would come from a lack of common off-days could easily be worked around, so easily that I don't see why they're not already worked around. Who wouldn't benefit from more freedom to choose their days off?