The Holiday Season

With Thanksgiving approaching this week (more on that later), the start of the holiday season is 'officially' marked. This got me thinking about differences between UK and US in terms of holidays. Before coming over here, my over-riding impression was that people live to work here and take very little holiday (or vacation) time. Certainly not beyond two weeks even though they are allowed just as long as us in Britain. As I understood it, Christmas and Boxing Day came and went, and it was back to work as normal. I can certainly envision the city workers doing this - although admittedly the work ethic and hours in scientific circles are somewhat unusual anyway (both in the UK and the US). I am also fortunate in that my boss is very relaxed in this area and is of the mind that, so long as the experiments get done, then time off when you want it will not be a problem.

However, it's not all work work work over here and possibly to counter the lack of holidays that people take over here is the number of other holidays that there are. In England and Wales, there are six Bank Holidays and two Common Law Holidays (Christmas Day and Good Friday). This is, as i recall, one of the lowest in Europe (Scotland and N. Ireland have a couple more). Over here, there are also a couple more. There are eleven holidays in total (including Christmas Day). Admittedly, whilst not all of these are 'compulsory' (Martin Luther King Day for example) there are other considerations such that the day after Thanksgiving (traditionally a Thursday) is also usually given off. What is, perhaps, more of note is that the spacing of these holidays is much more even. Maybe these 'mini-breaks' go some way to explaining why the Americans do not need their holiday so much.