The Difference Between National Days, Federal Holidays, and Utter BS

April 15 is not tax day this year—that’s on April 18—but it’s the first day of Passover, Good Friday, and National Glazed Spiral Ham Day. Most financial markets, including the New York Stock Exchange, will be closed for the day, but banks will be open and mail will be delivered. Most stores will be open, but many schools will be closed. It’s an official holiday in 10 states, but not the other 40, and about 20% of American workers will enjoy a day off. So, what gives? Is Good Friday a holiday or not?

How we determine the holiday-ness of a given day is actually more complicated than you might think. It involves the nuanced interplay between the federal government, state governments, the private sector, and the collective unconscious of the citizenry.

Federal holidays, state holidays, municipal holidays, and public holidays

When it comes to holiday-definition, people who live in autocratic nations have it easy. The leader declares October 8 “Glorious Celebration of the People’s Victory Day,” and everything moves accordingly. Here in the United States, though, our troublesome “freedom” makes things messier.

We don’t have “national holidays” in the U.S., as no one is compelled to follow the lead of the federal government in these matters, so the most “official” kind of holidays we have are federal holidays. These are days that congress and the president determine require people to take a day off work. There are 11 most years, with an extra one thrown in every four years for presidential inauguration day. But the federal government’s holiday-power is limited to federal employees, contractors, and the people of Washington DC. They can’t make the rest of us do squat.

Individual states have no obligation to honor federal holidays, but they usually do. They often declare their own state holidays too, sometimes even enacting laws the determine what businesses can be open on those days. Smaller governments can engineer municipal or local holidays too.

Who decides whether you work on a holiday?

Federal, state, and local governments can name as many holidays as they want, but, generally speaking, they don’t dictate the holiday schedules of private companies. It’s ultimately up to business owners to determine whether private employees get a day off on any holiday. Maybe to make things easier, employers tend to use the federal holiday list as a template for their own schedules, although they often add non-holidays like Christmas Eve and the day after Thanksgiving to the calendar, while subtracting federal holidays like Columbus Day and Veterans Day. Our nation’s shittiest employers don’t give paid days off to any workers on any holidays and, sadly, they don’t have to, generally speaking.

To sum it up: There’s no list of holidays that apply to all Americans, but there’s a generally agreed-upon set of dates on which most employees in the private and public sectors can expect to have time off. These days (July 4, Christmas, and so on.) are referred to as “public holidays.”

What about religious holidays?

Religious holidays are another ball of wax, and also gets messy. Even though there are no official religious holidays in our secular nation, private companies can be obligated to give employees days off for religious reasons under certain conditions. According the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, businesses with more than 15 employees must make “reasonable accommodations” for workers’ religious observances. This is can include days off on religious holidays, provided employee absences don’t cause “undue hardship” for employers. The specific details of how accommodations are made and what kind of hardship is “undue” is ultimately determined by the court system and keeps many legal professionals busy (except on holidays, of course.)

But why is the New York Stock Exchange open on Good Friday?

This brings us back to Good Friday and the New York Stock Exchange: The NYSE closes on Good Friday and no one knows why. There are theories: Some say the lease of the building that originally housed the NYSE required the building be closed on Good Friday, and they just kept it up; some imagine a long forgotten deal between Jewish and Christian traders; some think a panic on Good Friday in 1907 spooked the financial world so much that it’s still felt to this day. And some just think stock traders like a three-day weekend. Ultimately, though, like all private sector holidays, it’s because the owners of the NYSE want it that way.

The difference between holidays and celebrations

The two most celebrated days in the United State are Christmas and Thanksgiving, both federal holidays, but the third most observed day is Mother’s Day. Mother Day shares the top ten with Halloween, Father’s Day, and Valentine’s Day, all days that are more widely observed than Labor Day, but that are not “holidays” in the strictest sense of the word. Because they’re not religious holidays and not federal holidays, they’re technically “celebrations.” (though they’re still called “holidays” in common speech), and the reason you don’t have those days off is because no one has convinced a major religion, or federal, state, and local governments to declare them holidays.

National Glazed Spiral Ham Day and other bullshit holidays

Have you ever caught a morning happy news segment where the hosts are saying things like, “Today is National Eat Some Ice Cream Day. Are you excited, Megan?” and wondered what they were talking about? They’re basically talking about nothing.

When it comes to non-religious, non-governmental holidays, it’s the Wild West out here. Every day of the year has been declared a special celebration of something by someone, from Kid Inventor Day (January 17) to World Juggling Day (June 18). These days are often invented by corporate public relations companies to sell products (I’m looking at you, National Sorry Charlie Day), and even though they occasionally have non-binding proclamations from some government body backing them, they are the farthest thing from a holiday imaginable. No one gets the day off. No one celebrates. No one cares. But people keep declaring them anyway, sometimes to give morning news hosts something to talk about and sometimes for the tiny chance that they catch on.

The importance of special dates rises and falls with the public’s interest: May Day was once widely celebrated in the U.S., as was Flag Day and Arbor Day. On the other hand, Día de Muertos is growing extremely popular, and so is Star Wars Day.

Ultimately, holidays and celebrations only become “real” if a lot of people care about them or a governing authority or church gives them an official seal of approval. So, who knows—maybe we’ll get together to celebrate National Glazed Spiral Ham Day some day, after all.