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The Holiday-Year Challenge
Suppose you want every day to be a holiday. To fulfill your dream you can travel around the world. You can take up to a 3-day holiday, like Japan's 3-day New Year, but not the 12 days of Christmas. You can also count Sunday or equivalent day of rest as a holiday. Can it be done? What is the longest holiday stretch possible?
Posted by Alex Tabarrok on March 17, 2008 at 07:35 AM in Travels | Permalink
Comments
How are we defining holiday? Does it have to be a national holiday, or does any can any little town's harvest festival count? Do people have to get the day off work for it to count?
If it could be done, I imagine you'd still have to recalculate for every year, since so many religious holidays - Hindu, Muslim, etc - run on a lunar calendar.
Posted by: Jaclyn at Mar 17, 2008 8:30:44 AM
Go to Venezuela, and became a University professor.There they have a month long holydays twice a year.Sometimnes , the University doesnt pay on time, that is before they leave .So the holydays doesnt star .Once threr were 6 weeks of holydays.It can be even worst or better, depending on you been student or professor.In 1986 there was a strike after holydays, professor were paid while on the strike. It lasted 4 and a half month. so profesors were in leave for 5 month and a half.
Posted by: karl at Mar 17, 2008 8:34:41 AM
It seems harder to find a day that is not some sort of holiday, particularly if you go back to the root word: holy days. Just taking saints' feast days from the Catholic Church gets you the entire year:
http://www.americancatholic.org/Features/saints/bydate.asp?SODmonth=Mar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_of_Saints
There are times when you do not celebrate saints' days, such as holy week, but that is another sort of holy day. Somewhere some group will be celebrating most saints at least as ardently as Americans celebrate St. Patrick.
Posted by: Zubon at Mar 17, 2008 8:51:11 AM
Certainly needs clearer rules. A former office-mate took almost the full year out (and used it to write _Bonjour Paresse_).
Posted by: Bertil at Mar 17, 2008 8:58:45 AM
Can you celebrate all the obscure little patron saints' days for various towns?
Posted by: Jacqueline at Mar 17, 2008 9:01:02 AM
Like this Saint Patrick fellow?
Posted by: Finance Monk at Mar 17, 2008 9:05:13 AM
If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work.
Or so I've heard. I'm not sure, myself.
Posted by: Kieran at Mar 17, 2008 9:06:08 AM
Who defines a holiday? Can I start my own religion and make some myself? Do I need to be in the country where a holiday is celebrated - and is it really a holiday if I'm running for my life in a war zone?
Posted by: David Weisman at Mar 17, 2008 10:05:57 AM
As far as a single holiday goes, I think Hanukkah has that pretty well wrapped up in terms of duration.
For trying to go through the calendar... well, the fact that many countries do not use the Gregorian calendar for their holidays makes it extremely difficult to iron out dates for them. One could probably get a pretty good stretch going, but I doubt that, without resorting to Catholic saint days, one could go year-round with relatively official holidays.
Posted by: Michael Fisk at Mar 17, 2008 10:20:20 AM
If I could live that dream I would fill in the gaps with Maximum Occupancy day.
http://www.maximumoccupancy.org/
Posted by: seth at Mar 17, 2008 11:10:32 AM
The answer is simple. Go to Spain. Nobody has a full count of the local holidays that are observed, but there is an official figure of over 25,000.
Sad really. We had a project to find a route through Spain such that we could spend every day of the year at a fiesta (counting only those that are observed as holidays by the local administration). The number of such routes turned out to be beyond our ability to compute.
Posted by: David Heigham at Mar 17, 2008 12:27:07 PM
Here's a pretty massive list of national public holidays (provided by a shipping company) from 2007. http://www.glovertrade.com/pages/interho1.htm
Seems like they have about 95% of the days covered. Shouldn't be too hard to fill in the gaps.
And if you have the time and money to travel all around the world for an entire year, can't you just consider your whole year as a personal holiday?
Posted by: Jared Milton at Mar 17, 2008 1:39:44 PM
Some interesting stats on holidays (and a good working definition of a holiday) per nation can be found at: http://www.financialcalendar.com/freestuff/country.htm
Poor Bosnia, "where residents sometimes have to go 731 days without a holiday."
Alex- on http://www.financialcalendar.com/freestuff/patterns.htm they show significant cyclical variation in global average number of holidays per year (we're at the peak, so this is the best year for holidays for a while).
The website (obviously waiting to be posted to an economics blog) wonders "Should GNP be higher in years when there are more working days? Not being economists, we're not qualified to answer that question. However, we can point out that the effect is very significant in some years. For example, in 2032 there will be 0.9% more working days than in 2031 (see chart below) [editor's note: to see the chart visit the site- it's pretty neat]."
Posted by: Jared Milton at Mar 17, 2008 1:59:30 PM
The problem is NP-complete in the general case. The reduction is from bin packing.
Posted by: Dr. Doofus at Mar 17, 2008 5:26:58 PM
To get halfway to living the aforementioned dream, become a diplomat and get posted to a country with a different religious tradition than your own. This was told to me by a Low Countries (geography blurred to to protect the, uh?) diplomat recalling his posting in Israel: he got both Jewish and Catholic holidays off. Given that he told me this over over a long lunch in a bar, means that the rest of the year not covered by Judeo-Christianly sanctioned slacking is, well, not really an issue.
Plus, free parking and duty-free cigs.
Posted by: 72 km/h at Mar 17, 2008 8:38:17 PM
that's easy. go over to and celebrate zappadan from dec. 4 to dec. 21.
then hang around for xmas, hannukah, kwanzaa, boxing day, new year's eve and new year's day. but since you're such a stickler, you can't count the eastern orthodox christmas celebration ending on theophany which lasts for 12 days (which i don't know why...the twelve days of christmas isn't just a song, ya know...it's a real celebration by a bunch of several east asians who happen to be orthodox. what are you, a religious bigot or something?)
personally, i consider every day you get up and are still above ground a holiday...
Posted by: skippy at Mar 18, 2008 1:25:21 AM
sorry, my last comment kind of got eaten.
i meant to say go over to the aristocrats and celebrate zappadan...
the rest is correct.
Posted by: skippy at Mar 18, 2008 1:27:56 AM
when I was a young man the best place to work was in Rome for a Jewish owned American stockbroker
Posted by: Hans Suter at Mar 18, 2008 5:56:25 AM
