Chris Meller

I read a blog the other day that asked the question “Since when was Good Friday a f***ing holiday?!”. While I am happy to have gotten the day off to laze around and do nothing more productive than go to el eye doctor, I have to agree. There was a time I remember that no one got Good Friday off except banks and the government (which gets every other week off for one holiday or another). In recent years, however, it seems that more and more corporations have begun to adopt Good Friday as a standard holiday. What? Are there actually executives sitting around saying to themselves “Well, we’ve got to give them Good Friday off, or they’ll just all take it off anyway”? I was astounded at the number of empty parking lots (including our own) that I saw while trying to run a few errands on Friday. What’s going on here? Have we lost sight of the separation of church and state (and to a lesser degree, business)?

So I ask you, why is this a holiday?

Basically, Good Friday represents the day in which Jesus was led away to be crucified, following Pilate’s sentence of death. Now, the entire Easter “holiday” has always amazed me. Whereas Christmas generally represents the birth of Jesus Christ, on Easter we chose to celebrate something wholly depressing as we slowly make our way into Spring. As the colors around us are changing, becoming ever brighter, and as we slowly peek our heads back outside after being cramped up indoors all winter, we choose not to celebrate the environment that’s coming to life around us, but rather to dwell upon the death of someone that [we] worshiped.

If anyone can point out the logic to this, please enlighten me. I’m sorry, but as I’m just coming out of a long dark winter, in which many people become overly depressed, I don’t particularly care to focus on something else depressing as I’m just starting to feel my head come back above water.

Even if I were a “believer”, I don’t know that I’d want to “celebrate” something that didn’t really deserve celebration, nor that I would give my employees an extra day off of work for such a celebration, which brings me back to my actual point. With all the horror going on around us on a daily basis, you only hear about the bad news the majority of the time. We’re constantly flooded with the fact that the entire human race is going downhill and becoming more and more evil, yet somehow we seem to have developed more Christians despite it, thus causing this non-holiday to become an actual holiday which we get off work.

If anyone can explain to me why it seems that our entire city is getting this day off work, please, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment to this post!