Thursday, March 27, 2008

Easter Break and other holidays

In Newfoundland, March Break is referred to as Easter Break, and the schools attach the 5 day recess to the Easter weekend, making it 6 school days and two weekends long. If Easter is late in the year, the week off is the week before Easter weekend and the extra day is Easter Monday. This year though, the extra day was Good Friday and the week off is this week. While this seems like poor Newfoundlanders get shortchanged out of that extra day, in fact they still come out far ahead of the game.
The week before Easter included St Patrick's Day, and that is a civic holiday here. Not to be unfair to one founding group of settlers over the other, I'm told we also have a holiday for St. George's Day which happens in April. (I don't even remember celebrating St. George when I lived in England, but there are none more British than the British abroad.) Also we get Orangeman's Day in July because cultural and religious oppression is still OK here.
Other provincial holidays include Discovery Day in June (sometimes known as St. John's Day) , and Regatta Day in August. July 1 is called Memorial Day, not even Dominion Day as to used to be called in Canada, despite the fact that we still have Dominion Stores here. In fact Newfoundland has more holidays that any other province in Canada by far. We have an extra 6 altogether in addition to the National ones, while the rest of the provinces get only two, or in some cases only one. It's true look it up here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Six more holidays, huh? Clearly it's time to move.