Holidays and Holy Days are synonymous – thank God for them!
If you’re reading this on holidays, then you have medieval forebears to thank.
The very word comes from a corruption of Holy Days and were tied into religious festivals where normal work was suspended for the day (or few days) – the good news was that there was a Holy Day every month in addition to the traditional Sunday, ‘day of rest’.
The rural population of the Middle Ages had their days of rest and amusement, Middle Ages holidays were then much more numerous than at present. At that period the festivals of the Church were frequent and rigidly kept, as each of them was the pretext for a forced holiday from manual labour.
The concept of the weekend – a Saturday and Sunday off is a relatively recent phenomenon – the very etymology of the word goes back to the 1870s. The reason why we have both of these days off, appears to be largely lost in time, but appears to have evolved in the UK and the US at roughly the same time to accommodate both Christian and Jewish rest days.
By the mid-20th century most of the Western world followed suit and in the past decade, the Arab world has synchronised its weekends to match the west.
The weekend was also popularised by Henry Ford who demonstrated that business could offer employees two full days off with pay (in fact, he increased wages) and still be very profitable:
The results were noticeable. The Ford Motor Company saw reduced turnover and was spending less money finding and hiring new employees. The company was also able to retain the best people for the jobs it had, thus making the operation more efficient. And perhaps the least discussed aspect of this policy was that Ford’s own employees were now able to afford the cars they themselves were building. This plowed money back into the company as Ford’s employees did just this very thing.
As much as we all complain that the weekends are too short, think of this:
If the ideals of the French Revolution had spread globally, as was their intent, we’d have ended up with a decimal calendar with a 10 day week!
Their desperation to purge anything of religious significance (after all, God rested on the seventh day), resulted in a convoluted calendar in which the State’s day of rest came by once only every 10 days and every single day had a different name!
But that’s a story I’ll bring when Moonstone Conspiracy comes out but in the meantime, enjoy some Madonna doing some 80s-style aerobics, or something.