Labour Day is upon us. Many employers hate public holidays because they interrupt the workflow and reduce productivity to zero, if people actually take the day off. That wasn’t meant to be funny: the American companies I worked for sailed straight through the public holidays as if nothing had happened, with the exception of Christmas Day. Plus, many people have to work on public holidays: think bus drivers, hotel workers, newspaper employees, airline traffic controllers and so forth.
What is funny, however, is that almost all the public holidays in Bermuda are impostors, not what they say they are. I’ll explain.

A holiday on New Year’s Day makes no sense. Instead of showing our serious resolve to get ahead in the coming year, we are given the day off and lie around suffering from hangovers. Bad start.

Next up is Good Friday. That’s a religious festival, isn’t it? Is there not supposed to be a divide between Church and State? What if you’re not Christian? What if it’s not a particularly good Friday, but just an average one?

Bermuda Day, as we all know, is May 24. Except it sort of isn’t. It was Victoria Day once, then Empire Day. After that, it was called Commonwealth Day and now it’s called Heritage Day in certain quarters, i.e. Government, whose employees take off every public holiday and most of the other working days, too. (Thank Goodness. Think how much damage they’d do if they worked as hard as the rest of us at stopping the rest of us from working hard.)

We now have National Heroes’ Day in June. This was formerly known as the Queen’s Birthday, but (of course) it wasn’t held on her birthday. Then again, National Heroes’ Day isn’t really that either; it’s Lois Browne Evans Day. Why not let’s call it that?
I trust you’re catching my drift here.

Cup Match is two public holidays in a row. With the weekend, it’s almost a public holiweek. Given that no one does any work in July, it’s actually a holimonth. The two days of Cup Match are known as Emancipation Day and Somer’s Day. I believe plans were in hand at one time to change the latter to Dr. Brown Is Wonderful Day, but it didn’t happen because he wasn’t.

Labour Day is a public holiday on which the public is not required to labour. Silly, isn’t it? Remembrance Day is not much celebrated outside Bermuda, where it might as well be called Forgettance Day. Finally come Christmas Day, which celebrates the birth of Jesus, who was born in March, and Boxing Day (when boxing is not permitted by Bermuda law).

Oh, and by the way, if any of these holidays fall on the wrong day, say a Saturday, we just hold them on some other day when it’s convenient. It’s all nonsense, inna? Yet no one cares, providing they have a day off with pay, which is the only thing about public holidays that seems reasonable.