The medieval calendar had something like 80 to 100 feast days a year when work simply stopped. We engineered ourselves out of every one of them. I’m given to understand this is progress.
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@Daojoan In Denmark we recently lost our "Great Prayers day" which since 1686 had replaced a number of penitence days. So you could say that Christian reformation was what (partly) happened.
In all fairness the 20th century gave us weekends, 37 hours workweeks and min. 5 week holidays.
@Daojoan Of course people and animals won’t feed themselves. All the normal domestic tasks still have to be done.
@Daojoan Feast days were/are primarily a catholic church feature; the protestant reformation effectively did away with them
@Daojoan Many countries are talking about implementing a 4-day workweek these days.
Also, I lived for a while in Bavaria, Germany, and got the impression that they still have a ginormous number of saint-related holidays there.
@Daojoan 'Sorry m'lud, can't be actionin' the spreadsheets on the Feast of St Ignatius now, that'd be impiety, my apologies to t' stakeholders' - me, a bottle and a half of parsnip wine into Wednesday in my finest, mud free tights and codpiece.
@Daojoan Yeah, besides Sundays there would be one to two days a week without work, but you were expected to gather for religious or community ceremonies.
@Daojoan not just stopping work but actively coming together as a community to celebrate. Sure we have the weekends that the other replies all talk about, but they're not a community day
@Daojoan I have two days off every week. That's 104 days per year. Add to that 6 weeks of paid vacation. That's another 30 days. To top it off there are about 10 public holidays per year like easter, christmas etc.
144 in total 🥳🇩🇰
@Daojoan Agreed, & ya know what? Even though it sounds so silly doing things like “no work on the sabbath day” where some families would take it so seriously that they would sit and do as little as possible (because they would work extra the day before so little had to be done on the sabbath) and you know what? I think just the rest alone is the most important part! We need more rest, and days set aside where we are to do absolutely nothing!!!
@Daojoan I have 146 days off per year, 104 of them are weekends, the remainder I can take when I wish. My working day is 7.5hrs long sat at a desk with a constant flow of coffee and snacks. I'll take that over back breaking toil, serfdom and plague. 😜
We only need 1 feast day... eat the billionaires day
@Daojoan yeah, let’s bring back the feast of st. John the Baptist and Lughnasadh.
I could use some summer holidays. (The dutch have none between may and december)
@Daojoan And yet I wouldn't trade places with one of them.
@Daojoan OK, here's the issue. We have fifty-two feast days a year where work simply stops right now. We call them "Saturday".
Like, for my family in Poland it was a *big fucking deal* when they finally got Saturdays off some time in the seventies.
@Daojoan but did they have weekends?
