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Why not make all holidays land on Monday, so we can have that long weekend. The very idea of going to work for a day or two, getting a day off a day, then going back for a day or two is stupid.
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Because they're specific days, not 'whenever you feel like it'. |
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Good idea, but for the fact that some holidays are specific to a certain day, like July 4 in the US. |
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Given that most people have no intention of observing the holiday as a celebration of whatever it originally signified, I think you're probably on the right track. Let's secularise the world! Ohh... we're about to try to do just that? |
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I don't see why if Easter can be chosen by some seemingly random but actually intricate arcane ritual (I'm sure there's divination by chicken intestines involved in there somewhere) we can't just choose Mondays (or Fridays, for that matter) arbitrarily and invent some justification for it. It *would* be a bit of a bastard if Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day were all on Monday though (the same Monday or consecutive Mondays?), so I think you should allow for consecutive holiday periods to run as long or extra-long weekends. |
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Mind you, I still won't be working on January the First, whatever day it is. |
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With the exception of Christmas, New Year and Good Friday, all permanent public holidays in England *are* on Mondays.
Additionally, my wife (who works in the NHS) gets four additional days which are tagged onto existing long weekends, making them longer still. Certain civil servants also get Maundy Thursday as a holiday. |
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Indeed. English bank holidays are cleverly named to give little indication as to exactly when they ought to fall. "August Bank Holiday" narrows the day off to a Monday during August, but in practice always seems to be the last one. "Spring Bank Holiday" is even less specific, but appears somewhere towards the end of May. "May Day" is the only misnomer, as it rarely falls on the first of May.
As far as I know, Scottish holidays are similar, except they get January 2nd off too, in order to help them recover from Hogmanay. |
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Indeed. Actually, we've all got the "September Weekend" coming up this Friday-Monday (we skip the August Bank Holiday that England gets). Wahey! |
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Oh, and yes - As Lemon says. I won't be working January 2nd either, whatever day it is. |
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[Guy Fox], Easter is pretty simple to calculate. It's the first Sunday after the Paschal Full Moon. Whilst it wasn't always celebrated on a Sunday, it has been since about 530 AD, when Dionysius Exiguus set out a method of calculation. The Venerable Bede defended his calculations, lending more weight to them in the 600's. |
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The Paschal Full Moon is sometime between March 21 through April 18, inclusive. Thus the date of Easter is from March 22 through April 25, inclusive. The date of the Paschal full moon is determined from tables, and it may differ from the date of the the actual full moon by up to two days. The tables are used because the full moon does not occur at exactly the same time all over the world; i.e. it may occur on different (local, not UT) dates depending where you are in the world. If the date of Easter was based on local observations, then it would be possible for different parts of the world to celebrate Easter on different dates in the same year. |
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To further confuse the issue, many countries did not start using the Gregorian calendar in 1582, so Easter in those countries was celebrated at different times to those places which did, *until* they began using the Gregorian calendar. And some countries that switched to the Gregorian calendar used a different definition of Easter for some time (parts of Germany and Sweden used tables based on the observations of Tycho Brahe to determine Easter for many years after the Gregorian calendar was adopted in those locations). |
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An interesting upshot of the algorithm is that the cycle of Easter dates (in the Gregorian Calendar) repeats every 5,700,000 years. Of further interest is the small problem of the gradual increase in the length of our days, that is to say the number of days in a year is slowly decreasing. The current rate of increase in the length of the day implies that the Gregorian calendar will need to neglect a leap year sometime in the 4th or 5th millenium. |
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Getting back to Easter however, a greater likelihood is that some time in the near future the date of Easter may be fixed to a particular Sunday. At Vatican II, Pope John XXIII stated that there was nothing wrong with fixing the date of Easter, possibly to the second Sunday in April, which would put it somewhere between April 8-14, inclusive. Many members of the World Council of Churches agree with this approach. |
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Easter for the next 4 years is:
2002 (Western) Easter Sunday is 31 March
2002 (Orthodox) Easter Sunday is 5 May
2003 (Western) Easter Sunday is 20 April
2003 (Orthodox) Easter Sunday is 27 April
2004 (Western) Easter Sunday is 11 April
2004 (Orthodox) Easter Sunday is 11 April
2005 (Western) Easter Sunday is 27 March
2005 (Orthodox) Easter Sunday is 1 May
NB. I added the Orthodox observance dates in case we have any Greek or Russian Orthodox 1/2bakers. |
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