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Should the Start of Chinese New Year Be a Federal Holiday?
First time accepted submitter CarlosF writes "Does Lunar New Year belong alongside those other red-letter days? Efforts to recognize Lunar New Year at the state and local level have been afoot for years. In 1994, San Francisco decided to close public schools on Lunar New Year, but this was largely a response to demographic reality rather than political pressure."
start celebrating Mexican holidays as well? They outnumber the Chinese in US.
Lets not start going on that slippery slope.
Having to observe both American *and* Chinese holidays is a bit too much. Mid-Autumn festival, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the solar New Year, and the lunar New Year--and for each one I'm expected to go home and spend time with the parents. If the lunar new year becomes a federal holiday, there goes my last excuse!
Well, we know the answer is no.
The way it should go is exactly the way it will go: if the Chinese population in a given area is large enough that the inhabitants cannot ignore the celebration, they will recognise it. That area can be a county, state or country.
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Shouldn't your question be "should it be a federal holiday in the USA"? It is already in China.
In medieval times the calendar was packed with holidays, about one per week IIRC. Seems like that would've been a good way to blow off some steam, eh? Most of these are only historical curios now. I'd be for bringing those back, or secular equivalents, rather. Starting with Festivus, of course. Feats of Strength!
I would further like to suggest that we should then celebrate the first day of the month following the start of the lunar year, But let's not stop there, keep it up and we can get the whole year off. Except that I tend to work in industries that don't recognize most federal holidays. That's just for those lazy government workers.
In fact, forget mandatory holidays anyway, just give me more paid time off that I can take on my own schedule.
Yeah. You know what else is useless? Weekends. What's up with that crap. I mean, abolish them, and we could work 7 days a week. Woot!
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
a loanshark an inconceivably large sum of money, and was only able to go about my business and you know, exist, because of the loanshark's continuing goodwill... I'd probably go out of my way to wish him happy birthday when it rolled around.
Just saying.
Trolling slashdot is a time honored tradition.
Russia tried something like that where people worked 5 days on and 1 day off. This allowed factories to run 24/7 or at least until they broke. The mechanical failures was part of the reason Russia went to a kooky sub-7 day week and shortly after that they went to a normal 7-day week. People and machines need time for scheduled maintenance/beer.
In 1994, San Francisco decided to close public schools on Lunar New Year, but this was largely a response to demographic reality rather than political pressure.
Which is as it should be, and an indicator that federalism is working just fine, thank you very much. In an area where lots of people want to take the same day off, it's off. Otherwise, it's not. Heck, we could make Nooruz (Persian New Year) a national holiday, but I doubt there's a demand for that anywhere except in certain parts of Los Angeles. It would be nice for the various Slavic and Greek enclaves around the US if their New Year (based on the Julian rather than Gregorian calendar) was a national holiday. We could make Rosh Hashanah a national holiday, along with at least half a dozen different New Year days from India (it depends on the region). Etc. Etc. Etc.
It's one thing to be respectful of minority groups, and for everyone to have the same legal rights regardless of ethnicity, religion, etc. That's as it should be. But it's an entirely-different thing to bend over backwards pretending that there are no minorities. I wouldn't expect to get Christmas off if I lived in China, nor would it be any kind of insult or malign discrimination on China's part if I didn't.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
The argument likely aims at the fact that storming of Bastille was the event that launched chain that resulted in creation of modern democracy, modern Western power structures and Napoleon Code.
The storming of the Bastille happened years after the American Revolution, and unlike the American Revolution, which resulted in (relatively) liberal democracy right away, the French Revolution resulted in the Reign of Terror (hardly a model for democracy), and the re-establishment of monarchy several times (Napoleonic and Bourbon kings and emperors). In fact, the French Revolution scared a lot of other countries from liberalizing and becoming more democratic (see Edmund Burke's writings, for instance)
Also, the Napoleonic Code also has nothing to do with the common law practiced in the US (outside of Louisiana and Puerto Rico to some extent) or other Anglophone liberal democracies.
As soon as the night before is used as an excuse to get drunk by a large portion of the populace, who are then too hung over to go to work on the holiday, it will become an official American day off. New Year's day isn't a holiday because anyone is celebrating the start of a new year.
(dawn till dusk and a bit more, 7 days a week). Instead, you weren't supposed to have sex or any other sort of fun, and instead spend more time praying.
Now we call that "grad school".
Not a bad idea... really!
Most folks don't actually do 9-5 five-days-a-week of productive work every week these days... but reducing their workweek to 4-days is somehow not popular (especially if corp has to pay the same amount anyway, or alternatively employees taking a 20% pay cut).
Adding (paid, federal) holidays (like, a LOT of holidays) may have the same impact. Imagine an extra holiday every month giving everyone an extra 3-day weekend every month. From the cultural perspective, I can imagine that being an amazingly great thing. Call it "moon day" or whatever, invent some hallmark theme for it, etc.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
What about Beltane, May 1st, Lamnas August 1st, Samhain October 31st? They are all traditional Celtic holidays. May day was the beginning of the planting season. Lammas was the wheat harvest and was celebrated with bread, Samhain was a combination of Thanksgiving and New Years Eve. It was called the season of death because it was also the time animals were slaughtered for winter meat so they didn't have to feed them all winter. Far more people in this country grew up with May Day and Halloween celebrations than Chinese New Year. We already celebrate a New Year so how many redundant new years do we need to have to keep everyone happy?
Im sure youre a blast to have at parties.
"Stop all of this illogical merrymaking! We should be acting as productive members of society!"
Everyone's a doubter...crap, made me set my beer down and google it for your reading pleasure. Forgot where I originally read this, but here's Wikipedia's version:
From the autumn of 1929 until the summer of 1931, each Gregorian calendar year was usually divided into 72 five-day weeks (=360 days), three of which were split into two partial weeks by five national holidays. The two parts of each split week still totaled five days—the one or two national holidays that split it were not part of that week. Each day of the five-day week was labeled by either one of five colors or a Roman numeral from I to V. Each worker was assigned a color or number to identify his or her day of rest.
Eighty per cent of each factory's workforce was at work every day (except holidays) in an attempt to increase production while 20% were resting. But if a husband and wife, and their relatives and friends were assigned different colors or numbers, they would not have a common rest day for their family and social life. Furthermore, machines broke down more frequently both because they were used by workers not familiar with them, and because no maintenance could be performed on machines that were never idle in factories with continuous schedules (24-hours/day every day). Five-day weeks (and later six-day weeks) "made it impossible to observe Sunday as a day of rest. This measure was deliberately introduced 'to facilitate the struggle to eliminate religion'".[1]
The colors vary depending on the source consulted. The 1930 color calendar displayed here has days of purple, blue, yellow, red, and green, in that order beginning 1 January.[2] Blue was supported by an anonymous writer in 1936 as the second day of the week, but he stated that red was the first day of the week.[3] However, most sources replace blue with either pink,[4][5][6][7][8] orange,[9][10][11] or peach,[12] all of which specify the different order yellow, pink/orange/peach, red, purple, and green. The partial 1930 black and white calendar from Kingsbury and Fairchild (1935) displayed here does not conform to any of these because its red day is the fifth day of the week, which even disagrees with their own statement that red was the third day of the week.[9]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar
I see no reason to have a statutory holiday dedicated to worshipping the moon.
Yes, the Sun is the one, true God.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The Sun is female, the Moon is male.
The ancient Egyptian worshipers of Ra the sun god, as well as the Roman worshipers of the sun god Apollo the sun god of Luna the moon goddess would all like to talk to you about that.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Call it "moon day" or whatever, invent some hallmark theme for it, etc.
Whatever you do, don't call it Moonday. We already have one of those every week, and it's a terrible day.
The thing is, the days really do have to be mandatory - otherwise, you get those people who basically live in the office and never use vacation time ruining it for everyone else. They almost never do more work, they're just slower at it (because they're burnt out from never taking any time off, it's a chicken and egg thing I guess). The worst part is that because "butts in seats" is an easily quantifiable metric (significantly easier than, say, "work quality" or "features completed"), managers tend to even encourage that self-destructive behavior.
That's pretty much how the USA got to where it is right now, in fact - we have the worst time off laws of almost any nation, and it's largely because of the ridiculously overblown Protestant "you should either be working, eating or sleeping" work ethic. We would probably get more done as a country if we had more time off.
We would probably get more done as a country if we had more time off.
Funny you should mention this. Just this morning on CNBC there was a guy who talked about this very subject. His main point was that people should get roughly 10 hours of sleep each night, not the recommended 8 and certainly more than whatever the national average is.
He also mentioned that people should take naps in the afternoon to recharge as well as take more vacations as they are more productive afterwards.
Finally, the blurb across the bottom of the screen said according his book, most people work in 90 minutes bursts of creativity then have to recharge for the next round.
Overall, working more hours does not produce more work and people who think they can be more productive by working more and sleeping less are actually doing the opposite.
This is the link to the interview from this morning and this is a link to a related story from last year saying the same thing.
Having said all that, do I want Chinese New Year to be a holiday? No. Holidays should be reserved for unique events, such as our Declaration of Independence, not some general celebration such as New Years (Chinese or not).
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower