Should the Start of Chinese New Year Be a Federal Holiday? 307
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."
Re:No, it shouldn't (Score:2, Interesting)
All holidays should be abolished. At least at the federal level anyway. Celebrating a "holiday" simply because it's the first day of a new year? We should have stopped that nonsense long ago.
Ridiculous (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, we know the answer is no [wikipedia.org].
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.
Re:No, it shouldn't (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Re:No, it shouldn't (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:If I owed (Score:2, Interesting)
US citizens hold the majority of US debt (68%), and that doesn't make our government beholden to us! (Trivia: Japan and China both own 8.3% of US debt.)
Re:No, it shouldn't (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:No, it shouldn't (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]