All things Easter, Spring Solstice, Passover, or Ostara

[CellarDweller]

When I was a kid, we got both as holidays from school--and that was public school.

I think some kids may get the Monday after Easter if they have spring break at that time.

When I was a kid I went to Catholic school, so we would get a half day on Thursday, but back to school on Monday.

[Jeff Wrangler]

I was a kid at around the same time, but I don't think we got those other days off. Must have depended on the community, I guess? I've always thought it slightly weird that Christmas is a federal holiday. I guess there'd be too much outcry if it weren't.

"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December."--Ebenezer Scrooge

[Sason]

We sure got them all off in Catholic school.

I often tease Sonja, because Sweden is such a secular country; yet, they get all the Catholic holidays off!

True!

But then, Christianity was a major defining power in society for around 1000 years.

The church had a major impact on every aspect of society, government, people's lives, laws...everything.

The church was formally separated from the state only 26 years ago. Although its power had diminished considerably over the last, say, 100 years, it was only then that the legal divorce between them took place.

[serious crayons]

"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December."--Ebenezer Scrooge

 

Come to think of it, when I was in (public) elementary school, Easter was always connected directly with spring break. So it was either the week after or the week before. There's a sneaky way of letting people take off surrounding holidays while keeping church and state somewhat separate.

Also, back then spring break might have been at the same every year, for all or many schools. I believe they started staggering them to spread crowds at resorts and airplane flights.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Come to think of it, when I was in (public) elementary school, Easter was always connected directly with spring break. So it was either the week after or the week before. There's a sneaky way of letting people take off surrounding holidays while keeping church and state somewhat separate.

Also, back then spring break might have been at the same every year, for all or many schools. I believe they started staggering them to spread crowds at resorts and airplane flights.

We didn't have a spring break.

[Sason]

We don't have spring break, but every school has Easter break and it's always a week, either before or after Easter.

Except for Xmas and New years, every holiday in Sweden is in the spring or early summer. Other than Easter we have Christ-flew-to-heaven-day, 1st of May, National day and midsummer. We also used to have second day of Pentecost, but that was traded for National day about 10 years ago.

(A secular holiday instead of a christian one, Paul!!)

[serious crayons]

We didn't have a spring break.

 

[serious crayons]

We don't have spring break, but every school has Easter break and it's always a week, either before or after Easter.

We had the same when I was a kid, called Easter break or spring break interchangeably. I assume whoever decides these things eventually emphasized the "spring" over the "Easter" to disassociate the public school vacations from the holiday, which happened either in tandem with spreading the breaks out to different weeks, not necessarily connected to Easter.

Except for Xmas and New years, every holiday in Sweden is in the spring or early summer.

Oh, you need to introduce the Brokie holidays of July 4 and Thanksgiving! We also have Labor Day, the first Monday in September, Columbus/Indigenous Peoples Day in October and Veteran's Day in November.

[Sason]

Your holidays seem to be more evenly spread throughout the year.

Not that we would want to move any of ours, but we wouldn't mind a couple of new ones in the autumn! 

[Jeff Wrangler]

We didn't have a spring break when I was in elementary school, just good Friday and Easter Monday, but those depended on the date of Easter, sometime in March or April.

Before I retired they had started to move holidays around at my job. We used to have Martin Luther King day in January, barely two weeks after New Year's. Then we had Presidents Day in February. Then we had nothing till Memorial Day--a long stretch. Then they stopped having Presidents Day and instead added Juneteenth, which made for an even longer stretch between MLK Day and Memorial Day with no holiday. However, they did give us a kind of floating holiday that we could use whenever we wanted to. I was using mine for Good Friday. I usually used a vacation day on Easter Monday so we could have dinner with the family on Easter Sunday, and then I'd travel back to the city on the Monday.