Don't Bank On A Holiday

In other countries, they have proper holidays instead of pointless, meaningless “celebrations” of the mere fact that the banks are shut. It is therefore unthinkable for the shops, or anything else not necessary to the maintenance of life itself, to be open on those days. But over here, heaven forefend that the little people might have a day off, too. John Major, who liked to portray himself as the voice and guardian of Old England, was defeated by one vote when he tried to make 25th December a normal shopping day. Good Friday and Easter Monday increasingly are, so expect Christmas to be next. Why, it is asked, should they be different from other “Bank Holidays”?

This sort of thing is inconceivable anywhere else. Whatever you may think of the American Declaration of Independence, or the storming of the Bastille, or any of the liturgical festivals that are public holidays in various parts of the Continent, they do at least have meanings beyond merely being this or that Monday in this or that month and, er, that’s it. So when they are holidays, everyone realistically expects to keep them as such. Yes, even shop assistants and delivery drivers. Imagine!

It is urgently necessary that Saint George’s Day, Saint Andrew’s Day, Saint David’s Day and Saint Patrick’s Day be made public holidays throughout the United Kingdom. In place, like them, of our ridiculous celebrations of the mere fact that the banks are on holiday, the real Whit Monday should be restored, and Ascension Day made a public holiday along with it.

Christmas Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday and Boxing Day should be retained, and Commonwealth Day (not Trafalgar Day, for who wants to sit in the wind and rain marking an inconclusive battle at which our admiral died?) added to them. Giving eleven, concentrated in our islands’ glorious spring and early summer.

But eleven is an odd number in more than one sense. How to arrive at a nice, round dozen? Well, if the Epiphany were restored as a public holiday, then so could be the ancient, yet really quite recently practised, observances of Twelfth Night, secure in the knowledge that there would be no work the next day.

No, the world would not simply shut down from lunchtime on Christmas Eve until the morning of 7th January, as it very largely does from lunchtime on Christmas Eve until the morning of 2nd January at the moment; the length of time would be too long for that. This way, there would be a real gap between the holidays. As, of course, there was historically, unless anyone really imagines that even subsistence farmers ever stopped work for twelve days on the trot. And the holidays themselves would mean something.

I really would take an awful lot of persuading that the observance of 1st January as a public holiday was of any especial antiquity in Scotland, or that there is any case for it now that Christmas Day is also observed as one. There as everywhere else, the preceding night’s activities revolve around nothing more, apart from booze, than the singing of a song to which most people do not know the words and which is not in fact about New Year anyway.

As much as anything else, the erection of Ascension Day and the Epiphany as public holidays would force the “Catholic” Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales to reverse its petulant lashing out against the election of an orthodox Catholic as Pope, namely its transfer of those holy days to the following Sundays, so that (unless we can attend thin-on-the-ground Latin Masses) we no longer get to celebrate them on the same day as the Holy Father, even though members of the Church of England and the Church in Wales do.