stevenpiziks | Good Friday Creep

A lot of people don't know what Good Friday is supposed to be. Good Friday is the day Jesus was crucified. By tradition, he was nailed to the cross at noon and hung there for three hours, whereupon he was taken down and entombed until he rose from the dead on Easter Sunday.

When I was in school, Good Friday was not a holiday. If you were Catholic, you were allowed to leave work at noon so you could go to church and sit vigil until three o'clock, at which point you were expected to return to work and finish out the day. Banks, stores, and libraries closed at noon and re-opened at three. I remember some of my elementary classmates being pulled out of school at 11:44. Some, not all. And those kids showed up to school in dress clothes, too. They went to church and arrived back at school a little after 3:00 so they could take the bus home at 3:15 and their parents could go back to work.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, the schools started closing for a half day on Good Friday, probably because the teachers got tired of figuring out how to plan lessons that they couldn't hold the Catholic students responsible for. All the way through high school, we had a half day on Good Friday. It made for a chaotic day, since this was also the Friday before spring break, or Easter break, as we called it back then.

When I started college, we got Good Friday holiday creep. Businesses and banks started closing at noon and not re-opening until Monday morning. The university, which had ignored Good Friday entirely, also started closing at noon, meaning your morning classes were on, but afternoon classes were canceled, making a headache for professors who had a morning and an afternoon section of the same class.

Over the years, the creep continued. Places started closing all day on Good Friday, on the grounds that it wasn't worth it to show up for only half a day, and too many employees were taking a half sick day anyway. Schools followed suit. So did universities.

Now Good Friday is a full day off. It's NOT a government holiday, but lots of banks and credit unions are closed anyway. It's become an unofficial holiday on the level of Christmas Eve--not officially recognized by the government, but most schools and banks and many businesses are closed anyway.

This bothers me. Other religions haven't gotten a holiday added to the national calendar. We already have the Christian holidays of Christmas and Easter recognized as government holidays. Why is Good Friday allowed to sneak in, too? We don't have Ramadan creep or Eid creep or Beltaine creep. The new Good Friday shouldn't get special treatment either.