Is there anywhere else on earth where they celebrate the mere fact that the banks are on holiday? How pointless is that? And just why is either 26th December (though not in Scotland) or 2nd January (in Scotland but nowhere else) a public holiday at all? Not “How did it come about?”, but “Why is it the case now?” Not least now that people in Scotland are habitually taking the English public holidays along with their own, the wholesale reorganisation of public holidays in the United Kingdom is urgently necessary.
Seventy-two per cent of Britons called themselves Christians at the last census, and no more than about one per cent is Eastern Orthodox. So the first source of holidays should be from the Western liturgical calendar as acceptable both to Protestant and to Catholic sentiment. Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day (forcing the Catholic Bishops’ Conference to restore it to its Biblical day as kept by the Holy Father) and the real Whit Monday (Whitsuntide, not Wilsontide) would do.
Then there are Saint George’s Day, Saint Andrew’s Day, Saint David’s Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, Commonwealth Day, and the Queen’s Official Birthday (if only in celebration of the simple existence of so quintessentially British a thing), all of which should be public holidays throughout the United Kingdom, just as the only flag displayed to represent any part thereof should be the Union Flag, and the only anthem played or sung should be God Save The Queen.
Giving eleven, an odd number in more than one sense. It would seem a bit churlish to abolish Wilsontide while retaining Heathmas on 1st January, but that would nevertheless be the obvious way of giving an average of one per month, with twelve throughout the year. Still very modest compared to what even subsistence farmers and their labourers managed to survive throughout the thousand years before the Reformation.
And good luck to anyone still claiming to be a Tory while objecting to the keeping of Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Ascension Day, Whit Monday, Saint George’s Day, Saint Andrew’s Day, Saint David’s Day, Saint Patrick’s Day, Commonwealth Day, or the Queen’s Official Birthday. Or, indeed, Heathmas.
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When are you taking over as PM? I for one greatly look foward to these Lindsaymases.
ReplyDeleteAs a middle-stump Anglican and cultural Tory, I am strangely unsurprised to find that it takes a Catholic with roots in the Labour Movement to demand that our public holidays be reorganised in order to celebrate the complex interweaving of Christianity, the Union, the Commonwealth and the monarchy.
"The complex interweaving of Christianity, the Union, the Commonwealth and the monarchy" is properly common to "middle-stump Anglicans" and Catholics, to "cultural Tories" and those with roots in the Labour Movement, among many others.
ReplyDeleteLet it be so again. And let it be celebrated as such by means of public holidays.
agnostic country cares little for the religiously inclined. The majority have effectively stripped Xmas of its religious meaning - time to shop for presents!
ReplyDeleteWhich agnostic country would that be? Certainly not seventy-two per cent Christian Britain. The likes of you asked us what we were, so we told you. But you don't like the answer. Do you?
ReplyDeleteThe presents thing is, of course, an integral part of the religious meaning. And, of course, Christmas church attendance remains more than respectable.
Please do not use the term "Xmas". Like people who call the Queen "Elizabeth Windsor", you just make yourself look ridiculous.
And rather sad and embittered these days: practically two generations later and these things still haven't happened, despite your (until recently) complete control of ... well, pretty much everything. So now, they never will.