On how many days of the year are there virtually no holidays (when people get a day off at work) in any country?
My expectation would be zero and I did a little research on the web, but found no conclusive answers. Many calendars include all sorts of special days (like Earth Day) but workers do not necessarily get a day off. So I’m really just looking for national, religious and/or other general holidays.
The question is a bit more complicated because some holidays depends on other calendar schemes, many based on lunar years.
So we could also ask the question like this:
In 2010 on which days does the majority of (employed) people in the world have to work? And how many of them are there? A useful condition might be to exclude (regional) holidays observed by less than a million people.
Another question would be:
Which are the most global holidays in 2010 (observed in most countries)?
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Some places I’ve been to, like Portland, have stores that are open Saturdays and closed on Monday. I think pretty much every day we can expect that the majority of employed people around the world have to work. A lot of the holidays we observe in the U.S. stem from religious roots that would not be shared in places whose major religion is something else, or country specific like Independence Day. The people I know, and the places I’ve worked, observe only a handful of holidays each year so the likelihood of them overlapping w/ many other countries isn’t all that great. Wonder if anyone else has more specific info?
I think most days aren’t holidays (at least not important ones anyway). If nearly every day was a holiday, then there’d probably be no point of holidays.
Here’s a site with all the bank holidays listed globally through 2070…
Not considering weekends. Sunday is not a holiday for Jew and Muslims, by the way.
@janbb – I guess I used the wrong keywords. Something like this definitely doesn’t help
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=how+many+days+year+no+holidays+any+country
Result number 1 is the definition of a holiday. Not very helpful. I wonder when artificial intelligence will be able to transform the query ‘On how many days of the year are there virtually no holidays in any country?’ into a suitable search engine query? Should be easier than passing the Turing test.
@mattbrowne Ah – that’s why there are librarians! Unfortunately, I am on vacation today.
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