Anti-Festivism

I was thinking about the implications of eliminating all national holidays this evening. There are quite a few days of the year, such as New Year's Day, Christmas, and others, on which the vast majority of people do not work. This seems horribly inefficient to me. The economy is essentially going into short-term hibernation. If you think about the value of lost work that the entire laborforce could have done in these periods, the cost of holidays is surely in the tens of billions of dollars. I would say that even if the current number of holidays were converted to flexible off-time that could be used at any point, there would still be appreciable efficiency gains, since businesses would be open for more time. All of this depends on a lot of variables and quite a bit of empirical evidence, which may or may not be supportive, but it is an interesting idea nonetheless.

However, one could just as easily argue that holidays in fact stimulate economic activity by compelling consumers to spend more. After all, people undoubtedly purchase the most goods during the November-December period. Not withstanding, this leads to the real question, which is: To what extent is consumer's expenditure on holidays driven by the amount of time that they have off from work versus a pure desire to celebrate the holiday for its own sake?

I don't know the answer, but I like to entertain the idea of abolishing holidays. It would eliminate the pressing problem in today's pluralistic society of what constitutes a day substantial enough to be a federal holiday. Why is Christmas more important than Hanukkah? The fact that more people celebrate it? Possibly. But is Columbus Day more meaningful than Hanukkah, or Kwanza, or the winter solstice pagan festival? It seems strange, since Columbus was essentially a greedy moron, who happened upon the not-so-new world, where he promptly and savagely enslaved an island, and brutally murdered and disfigured its inhabitants when they could not find him any more gold on Hispanola (the supplies had been exhausted and placed in Columbus's estate and the coffers of Spain). The Spaniard influence eventually succeeded in eliminating out much (most?) of the indigenous population in the Western hemisphere through disease and warfare. Should we celebrate that? It's a curious question.