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Here are some interesting facts about bank holidays from various countries. Enjoy learning something new!

• The term "bank holiday" exists because the UK's Bank Holidays Act of 1871 required banks and financial institutions to close — effectively freezing commerce for the day. Because banks shut, other businesses followed suit, and "bank holiday" stuck as the term for a public day off.
• The man behind Britain's bank holidays, Sir John Lubbock, was not just a politician but also a banker, naturalist, and archaeologist who published one of the most influential archaeological textbooks of the 19th century. Grateful workers nicknamed the new holidays "St. Lubbock's Days" in his honour.
• According to one popular legend, Sir John Lubbock allegedly chose the original four English bank holidays to coincide with cricket matches he wanted to attend — making Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August, and Boxing Day effectively a cricket fan's legislative gift to the nation.
• Before the 1871 Act tidied things up, the Bank of England observed around 40 saints' days and royal anniversaries as holidays. By 1834, in the name of industrial efficiency, that number had been ruthlessly slashed to just four. Workers who had been used to near-weekly celebrations suddenly had almost none.
• The very first official UK bank holiday was observed on 5 August 1871 — and was reportedly used by bank employees to attend a cricket match between England and Australia at the Kennington Oval. The holiday was literally born on a cricket ground.
• New Year's Day only became a bank holiday in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1971 — meaning that a holiday which feels ancient and immovable only became official within living memory. Scotland, however, had recognised it since the original 1871 Act, nearly a century earlier.
• The UK's Spring Bank Holiday replaced "Whit Monday" in 1971, giving it a fixed date on the last Monday in May. Whit Monday — named after a Pentecostal season, not a misspelling of "white" — could fall anywhere between 11 May and 14 June, making it logistically inconvenient for a modern calendar.
• In 2011, the UK Coalition government seriously considered moving the May Day bank holiday to October and renaming it "UK Day" or "Trafalgar Day." The plan collapsed due to fierce opposition — not least because it would have disrupted May Day festivals and the traditional maypole celebrations that have taken place on that date for centuries.
• May Day's association with workers' rights traces back to 1886 in Chicago, when a general strike began on 1 May demanding an eight-hour working day. It culminated in the Haymarket Affair, and the date was subsequently chosen by the international labour movement as a global day of commemoration. This is why socialist and communist nations around the world adopted it as a major public holiday.
• The United States deliberately chose *not* to celebrate workers on May 1st. President Grover Cleveland feared that a Labour Day on 1 May would strengthen socialist and anarchist movements, so he championed a September date instead — the politically safer Labour Day that the US and Canada still observe today.
• In 1947, the US established "Loyalty Day" on 1 May specifically to counter communist influence and recruitment at International Workers' Day rallies. Patriotic parades replaced protest marches on that date — though the tradition eventually fizzled out as the political climate shifted.
• When President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving one week earlier in 1939 to extend the Christmas shopping season, the public backlash was so fierce that the holiday was mockingly dubbed "Franksgiving." Some states refused to recognise the change, and for two years Americans celebrated on different dates depending on which state they lived in.
• The "Franksgiving" experiment was eventually declared a failure. In May 1941, the Roosevelt administration admitted the earlier date had produced no measurable boost to retail sales. Congress stepped in, and Roosevelt signed a law in December 1941 permanently fixing Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday of November — not the last, to account for years with five Thursdays.
• Thanksgiving was proclaimed at different points in US history in March, August, September, and December before it settled on November. George Washington's first Thanksgiving proclamation in 1789 designated November 26, but presidents after him chose all sorts of dates until Abraham Lincoln standardised the last Thursday of November in 1863.
• Boxing Day's exact name origin remains genuinely uncertain. The two leading theories are: (1) it derives from the alms boxes kept in churches during Advent, which were opened and distributed to the poor on 26 December; and (2) it refers to the boxes of food, coins, and goods that wealthy households gave to servants on that day — since servants had to work on Christmas Day itself. Neither theory has been definitively proven.
• Boxing Day is also the Feast of St Stephen, the patron saint of horses — which is why horse racing and, historically, fox hunting became Boxing Day traditions. The foxhunting aspect was largely banned in England and Wales in 2005, though hunts using artificial scents continue, sometimes with clashes between hunters and protesters.
• Singapore used to observe Boxing Day as a public holiday, but it was quietly removed from the calendar. South Africa kept the 26 December holiday but renamed it "Day of Goodwill" — a more neutral framing that sidesteps the holiday's specifically British colonial associations.
• The name "Juneteenth" is a portmanteau of "June" and "nineteenth" — the date on which Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas in 1865 to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, more than two years after it had been signed. Many enslavers in Texas had simply withheld the information from those they held in slavery.
• Juneteenth is considered the longest-running African American holiday, with the first formal celebration held in Galveston the very year after emancipation, in 1866. It only became a US federal holiday in 2021 — the first new federal holiday established since Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983.
• The campaign to make Juneteenth a federal holiday was significantly advanced by Opal Lee, who began walking through her hometown of Fort Worth, Texas in 2016 at the age of 89 to raise awareness. She was standing next to President Biden when he signed the legislation in 2021, at the age of 94.
• Martin Luther King Jr. Day faced decades of resistance before it was universally observed. Musician Stevie Wonder actively campaigned for the holiday throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, releasing the song "Happy Birthday" in 1980 as an anthem for the cause and presenting a petition with over six million signatures to Congress in 1983. The holiday wasn't celebrated by all 50 US states until the year 2000.
• Veterans Day in the United States was moved to the fourth Monday in October in 1968 under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which was designed to create more long weekends. The change was so unpopular — veterans and their organisations felt it disconnected the holiday from its historical meaning on 11 November (Armistice Day) — that the government reversed course and restored the original date in 1978.
• The US holiday was originally called "Armistice Day," commemorating the end of World War I on 11 November 1918. In 1954, Congress broadened its scope to honour all American veterans of all wars and changed the name to "Veterans Day." The UK equivalent, Remembrance Day, has never been made a public bank holiday — it is observed on 11 November with a two-minute silence, but workers are not given the day off.
• Northern Ireland's 12 July bank holiday, "The Twelfth," commemorates the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 and was only introduced as an official bank holiday in 1926. It remains the most politically charged bank holiday in the UK, with Unionist marches that still occasionally spark tension in interface communities.
• Denmark abolished its "Great Prayer Day" — a public holiday celebrated on the fourth Friday after Easter — in 2023. The government argued the extra workday was needed to fund increased defence spending. The IMF calculated that the abolition would increase Denmark's GDP by a grand total of between 0.01% and 0.06%. Many Danes were unimpressed.
• Portugal scrapped four public holidays in 2013 as part of austerity measures following the financial crisis, removing All Saints' Day, Corpus Christi, Republic Day, and the feast of St Anthony. All four were eventually restored in 2016 once the worst of the austerity period had passed — a rare case of cancelled holidays being resurrected after public pressure.
• France's Prime Minister suggested in 2025 abolishing Easter Monday on the grounds that it has "no religious significance" compared to Easter Sunday itself, and scrapping 8 May (Victory in Europe Day) to boost economic output. The proposals sparked fierce public debate. With 11 public holidays, France sits roughly in the European middle — behind Cyprus (15), Bulgaria, Croatia, Malta, Iceland, and Spain (14 each).
• England and Wales, with only eight public holidays, sit at the very bottom of the European league table for public holidays — below Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Scotland gets nine and Northern Ireland ten. The TUC has repeatedly lobbied for four additional bank holidays, so far without success.
• Japan's "Golden Week" — a cluster of four national holidays between 29 April and 5 May — is one of the world's most distinctive holiday phenomena. In 2007, a Japanese law amendment decreed that if two public holidays fall on weekdays separated by a single day, that sandwiched day automatically becomes a holiday too, creating spontaneous three-day mini-breaks.
• New Year's Day on 1 January is the single most widely observed public holiday in the world, celebrated as a national holiday in at least 169 countries. International Labour Day on 1 May comes second, observed in at least 144 countries — though, as noted, the US and Canada are among the notable holdouts.
• The US holiday of Columbus Day, established in 1968 on the second Monday of October, has become one of the most contested public holidays in any country. Numerous US states and cities have replaced or supplemented it with "Indigenous Peoples' Day," and a sustained national movement to abolish the federal holiday continues to grow.
• Scotland's "Hogmanay" traditions around New Year are so deeply embedded in the culture that 2 January — the day after New Year's Day — is also a bank holiday in Scotland. The tradition of "first footing" (being the first person to cross a neighbour's threshold after midnight, ideally carrying coal, salt, or whisky) means many Scots genuinely need two days to recover.
• St Andrew's Day (30 November) only became a Scottish bank holiday in 2007, despite St Andrew being Scotland's patron saint. Even then, the legislation was permissive rather than mandatory — employers are not legally required to give workers the day off, making it something of a holiday that exists on paper more than in practice.
• Ireland's most recent public holiday addition was St Brigid's Day on 1 February, introduced in 2023 — the first new Irish public holiday in decades. It falls on the ancient Celtic festival of Imbolc, marking the beginning of spring, neatly fusing pre-Christian and Christian traditions. Ireland now has ten public holidays in total, more than any other part of the UK or Ireland.
• The ancient Celtic cross-quarter festival of Lughnasadh on 1 August — which marked the beginning of the harvest and included a one-year trial marriage ceremony — has essentially vanished as a public observance in the British Isles, though it has seen modest revival among Celtic neopagans. The August Bank Holiday placed on roughly the same date by Lubbock's Act preserves the seasonal timing, if not the ritual.
• The old Scottish "Handsel Monday" — the first Monday after New Year's Day — was a tradition where employers gave servants gifts and a day off. "Handsel" is a Middle English word meaning good luck or good omen. It faded out in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as modern employment structures replaced the master-servant dynamic it was built around.
• "Meal Monday" was a Scottish academic holiday when university students were given a long weekend specifically to travel home and collect oatmeal from their families — since many students subsisted on porridge and couldn't afford to feed themselves for an entire term. Most Scottish universities abolished it in the 20th century as student funding became formalised.
• Franklin Roosevelt's famous "bank holiday" of 1933 — when he closed all American banks to stop a catastrophic wave of withdrawals during the Great Depression — is entirely unrelated to the British concept of a bank holiday. The US closures were an emergency economic measure, not a day of rest. Yet many Americans incorrectly assume the term "bank holiday" originated from this event, when in fact the British had been using the term for over sixty years by then.
• In Poland, the cluster of holidays around 1 May (Labour Day) and 3 May (Constitution Day) has become culturally known as "Majówka" — The Picnic. With a few days of annual leave, workers can create a nine-day unbroken holiday. It is one of the most popular and anticipated informal extended breaks in Europe.
• At least 154 countries have Christmas Day as a national public holiday — including several where Christians are a small minority. Nine countries recognise Orthodox Christmas in early January instead, and a handful of nations including Belarus, Lebanon, and Sudan observe public holidays for both the 25 December and early January dates.
• Qatar has a national public holiday called "National Sports Day," held on the second Tuesday of February. It was established in 2012 to encourage citizens to exercise. North Korea has a "Tree Planting Day" as an official public holiday — a rare example of an environmental holiday with full national observance.
• Bangladesh's "Language Martyrs' Day" on 21 February commemorates students killed in 1952 while protesting for the right to use the Bengali language. UNESCO later designated 21 February as "International Mother Language Day" in 1999, transforming a national tragedy into a global observance — arguably the only case of a domestic public holiday being elevated to worldwide recognition by the UN.
• The UK has declared additional "one-off" bank holidays for major royal events, including coronations, jubilees, royal weddings, and — in 2022 — the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. These are declared under powers granted in the original 1871 Act, which made provision for any day to be officially proclaimed a bank holiday by royal proclamation.
• The 2002 Golden Jubilee, the 2011 Royal Wedding, and the 2022 Platinum Jubilee each added a one-off extra bank holiday to the UK calendar. For the Platinum Jubilee, the Spring Bank Holiday was moved from late May to early June to create a four-day weekend — a deliberate choice to maximise the likelihood of decent weather for outdoor celebrations.
• The word "holiday" itself derives from "holy day" — a day set aside for religious observance. The modern concept of a paid secular day off is a relatively recent innovation. For most of history, days off were either religious observances, harvest festivals, or locally organised community events rather than anything codified in national law.
• In the United States, individual states can legally ignore federal holidays and designate entirely different ones of their own. Massachusetts celebrates Patriots' Day; Louisiana celebrates Mardi Gras; Rhode Island observes Victory Day; Illinois and Missouri recognise Malcolm X Day. Texas recognises Christmas Eve as a state holiday, but does not observe Columbus Day.
• The Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 in the United States deliberately moved several holidays to Mondays to create more long weekends — a change explicitly lobbied for by the tourism and retail industries. Critics argued it untethered holidays from their historical dates and drained them of meaning, a sentiment that eventually led to Veterans Day being restored to its original 11 November date in 1978.
• Slovakia's government decided in 2024 to stop making 17 November — "Day for the Struggle for Freedom and Democracy," commemorating a pivotal moment in the fall of communism — a day off, as part of fiscal tightening measures. The day retains official recognition; workers just no longer get it off. It joins a growing list of holidays that exist symbolically but no longer grant rest.
• In the early celebrations of Juneteenth in the 1860s and 1870s, formerly enslaved people would ceremoniously throw away the rags they had been forced to wear and put on their best clothes instead — often garments they had taken from their former enslavers. The act of dressing up was a profound statement of self-determination, since enslaved people in America had been legally prohibited from wearing anything other than what they were given.
• Cyprus holds the record in Europe for the most public holidays, with 15 national public holidays per year. England and Wales, by contrast, have just eight — making British workers among the least holiday-entitled in the entire European continent, a fact that trade unions regularly raise in lobbying campaigns for additional bank holidays.