With the liberty of consciencea increasing prestige in Western Europe since the Reformation, and its increasingly secular and even atheist character today, another Christian holiday at every turn is still jarring. I am a non-denominational Christian who was raised Baptist (though I did attend a Lutheran school for two and a half years,) so I have learned a lot the last couple years about Christian holidays I barely (if at all) knew existed. I have (at last count) thirteen bibles (not counting a couple Gideons) but did not even know what an Advent candle was two years ago. Meanwhile, my native country, so often criticized as overly religious, produced the first federal Constitution explicitly forbidding state established churches, and has a total of two federal religious holidays.

I tried to veer away from bank holidays because, though I do not know how it is in the rest of the world, US banks are notorious for getting every holiday imaginable, even if, as they say, "even bankers do not keep bank hours these days." My focus was not just the observance of religious holidays, but explicit federal recognition of them, particularly one religions to the exclusion of all others. It seems an odd thing for a nation with no state church, and especially so for one with explicit separation of church and state. Granted, that oddity exists in the US, too, but only for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and only by popular demand, which is increasingly gainsaid by the "militantly secular" (hence the fundie-rights oft-and-overstated complaints about the "war on Christmas.") Even Thanksgiving is increasingly portrayed as a purely secular holiday (as Tom described) though that still forces me to ask to what/whom we are therefore expected to give thanks.