Types of Holidays

A holiday is a day on which normal daily activities including businesses, offices and schools are suspended or reduced according to local, national and international law or custom. Holidays are generally intended to allow people to commemorate or celebrate a great historical event, a tradition of religious or cultural significance. Holidays originated from celebrating religious traditions each year by a specific community on a specific date on the international calendar. In a lot of cultures, there is a crisp distinction between holidays designated by the government and holidays associated with religious traditions.

The term “holiday” has different connotations in different regions such as in the U.S.A, this word is used to refer to a day observed for the celebration of a day or an event based on nationality, religion or culture whereas in the U.K and some other commonwealth nations, the word is used to refer to a set of days taken off by the employees to spend some quality time with their families or by themselves, people in the U.S.A call it a vacation.

There are different types of holidays celebrated across the world and they can be grouped as:

National holidays: All independent nations celebrate national holidays based on the significance of their historical events. There are some countries though which just mark the national days but it’s not a holiday on that day such as the U.S.A or Hungary.
Public holidays: These holidays do not have a uniform definition throughout the world. These public holidays occur on the same date every year irrespective of the weekday and it off for workers employed in the private and public sectors.
National day: This day is of great significance to any country as it marks the day of importance for the creation of that country such as signing its constitution, getting independence e.t.c. U.K and Denmark are the only two countries in the world without a national day/
Religious holidays: There are different religions in the world and a lot of holidays are linked to them. The main holiday in Christianism is Christmas and Easter, for Hinduism, it is Diwali and Holi. In Islam religion, popular holidays are Ramadan and Eid-al-Adha. In Judaism, Shabbat is very important and Vaisakhi is of great significance to Sikhism. Similarly, there are different holidays for all other religions.
Bank Holidays: The commonwealth countries or the ones colonised by the British at some time have bank holidays as public holidays but in a lot of other countries this holiday is just for the banks.
Gazetted holidays: These are the holidays that are declared mandatory by the government of the respective nation. Thus this holiday is observed by all educational institutions including public and private sectors.
Restricted holidays: These holidays are designated for specific communities to entertain the diversity of the nation, although government offices and businesses do not close on this holiday.
Bridge holiday: Bridge holidays are declared sometimes to accommodate a holiday on a Thursday or a Friday into a long weekend, thus making a bridge. And sometimes, the holiday is then compensated by declaring some other Saturday or another weekday a working day.
Federal Holidays: These holidays are specifically celebrated in the U.S instead of national holidays. On the federal holiday, the federal offices are closed and employees are paid for the holiday.
Statutory holidays: These holidays are another term for the gazetted holidays by the government. The term “statutory holiday” is used in Canada to indicate a mandatory holiday.
Personal holidays: These can include birthdays and anniversaries and are often taken by employees to spend time with their friends and family.
Special occasion holidays: These holidays consist of celebrations of different occasions such as silver jubilee (25 years), golden jubilee (50 years), century (100 years), inaugurations or closing ceremonies.
There are some days such as Teacher’s day, Children’s day or Environment day, when schools, other educational institutions or offices would not be on explicitly closed but would be celebrating the said days and thus regular office work does not commence on these days. Therefore they can also be considered as a type of holiday.

Now talking about the holidays known as vacations in some countries, we have different types of holidays here too. From a solo trip to a countrywide family trip, there are so many varieties in these types of holidays. The popular holidays are an abroad trip, beach holiday, mountain holiday, camping trip, honeymoon, a road trip, bucket list travel, wildlife adventure, safari and other adventure sports holidays. The newest addition to these types of holidays are workation and staycation, these became popular in the time of the pandemic of COVID’19 as people were mostly working from home and needed breaks.

Types of Holidays

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