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Religious holidays: Why are we still getting days off on religious holidays?

By Bea Lindberg

Before studying at the University, I never really put much thought into why we still get days off on religious holidays. I work at a retail store and study the Study of Religions at the University of Åbo Akademi, and it hit me on Easter Monday that I get double the salary and days off from lectures. For me Easter Monday and Good Friday are just any other days of the year, the only difference is that I have a lot more customers at work and that we usually don’t have lectures on these days. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy all the perks I get from the holidays. But I’ve started to wonder why religious holidays still remain part of Finland’s official calendar.

By deep diving into the reason of the Finnish religious holiday celebrations, I found out that the National holidays are determined by the Finnish Parliament, and that there is an official list of holidays that are released each year (Public Holidays Global, 2025). Which brings me to an interesting public debate that is going on about the theme of religious holidays, which is whether public holidays should reflect the diversity of today’s society, or should we stick to old traditions? The tricky part here, is that the Finnish Parliament would need to add all the new religious holidays to their official list of holiday celebrations, and that would mean even more days off for everyone. Moreover, the issue of which religions would get their public and official holidays to the list would probably cause a lot of dissatisfaction and arguments in the different communities.

Moreover, Aastha Gupta discusses in her article, about religious holidays, that instead of making every religious holiday official in the calendar year, schools and workplaces could instead give some type of leeway (The Daily Campus, 2022). This could be in the form of time off or extensions at work. On the other hand, I can see how this would become a bit problematic, in the sense that many workplaces and schools would be unwilling to follow this if it wasn’t obligatory.

Conversely in my opinion, holidays like Easter and Christmas have also lost their religious feel and spiritual aspects, it’s (on the negative side) more about consumerism, purchasing gifts and decorations, and (on a more positive note) about spending quality time with loved ones on a day off. I would say that not that many of the people I know think about the resurrection while eating Easter dinner with their family or think about the birth of Jesus Christ while decorating the Christmas tree.

This led me to think about something we covered in our Religion and Society course, which is secularization theory. The theory basically offers a simple explanation of why religious holidays remain in secular societies; as societies modernize, through science, individualism and rational thinking, religion loses its influence over public life (Furseth & Repstad, 2016). So even though holidays like Easter and Christmas are still part of our calendars, they are not about religion for most people. According to what we’ve been studying, this doesn’t mean that religion disappears completely; it just becomes more private or symbolic. I guess that explains why so many of us in some ways still celebrate these holidays, but more in the sense of eating good food and enjoying each other’s company.

Of course, some non-believers still do attend worship services or other activities that the local Church has to offer. Such as De vackraste julsångerna that my mom attends every Christmas at our local Church, even though our family isn’t that religious. Thus, I believe that it is still important that there are spaces for non-believers and religious people as well, to enjoy and celebrate Christmas and other religious holidays, even though it may only be for the purpose of “getting into the Christmas mood”.

 

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