I can think of no better time of the year to discuss the institution of the National Holiday.
In the US, legislation declaring a ‘national holiday’ is passed by Congress and signed by the President, just like any other law. On these Congressionally-designated holidays, most employees of the federal government are given the day off. But although Congress can close down the federal government, it can’t do the same for private businesses or even state governments. It is up to each company, and each state, to decide whether or not to give its employees the day off. If you are reading this from home today, chances are your employer has chosen to observe the national holiday of Christmas. (Or you are sitting at work, idly surfing the Web because there’s nothing going on.)
So what happens if a national holiday falls on the weekend? Federal law has an answer for that. If the holidays falls on a Saturday, federal employees get Friday off; if the holiday occurs on a Sunday, they can skip on Monday. For the details on national holidays, check out 5 U.S.C. Section 6103.
Now let’s talk Christmas, which is the only arguably religious national holiday. In 1998, a Jewish lawyer named Richard Ganulin filed suit in federal court, claiming that observing Christmas as a national holiday violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The Establishment Clause says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and Congress may have violated this provision when it declared Christmas to be a national holiday.
In the case of Ganulin v. United States (1999), the federal district judge rejected Ganulin’s objection. She ruled that, by giving federal employees the day off, Congress was simply recognizing the cultural significance of the day. Christmas is often celebrated as a secular holiday, and just because Congress gives people the day off doesn’t mean that Congress is promoting Christianity.
By the way, the next national holiday, is Tuesday, January 1st, 2008. Happy New Year!
