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So many religious feasts and national holidays and not enough people in the churches to celebrate them. Why should they? The beach resorts and ski resorts are much more beckoning. Belgium is a land of so many holidays. Public national holidays are quite numerous, and along with the mandatory 30 days holiday for all employees, people are working only 9 months a year. This is the perfect way to take away a person’s prerogative to complain of being overworked. School holidays are just as plentiful. If we could work as many days as the kids are in school, you can calculate more than 14 weeks of days off! That’s definitely more than the mandatory 3 months off from work. The following lists Belgium’s official school holidays:

• Autumn half-term break: or Herfstvakantie, 1 week, including All Saints’ Day (Allerheiligen) on November 1
• Winter holiday: 2 weeks, including Christmas (Kerstmis) and New Year (Nieuwjaar)
• Winter half-term break: or Krokusvakantie, 1 week. The crocus is one of the first buds from a bulb, very beautiful in white, purple or orange, that starts to bloom in late February or March (but this was before the earth’s temperature started to increase in a significant way) and so it is one of the first announcements of Spring.
• Spring holiday: Paasvakantie, 2 weeks, including Holy Week and Easter Sunday
• Easter Monday: Paasmandaag, Monday after Easter Sunday
• Ascension and Labour Day: Feest vakantie dag & Hemelvaart, May 1
• Whit Monday/Pentecost: Pinkstermaandag, Monday after Pentecost Sunday or 6 weeks after Easter
• Summer holidays: from July until the first Monday of September, when the children come back to school, coinciding with the beginning of the Carnival (Kermis)

Belgians really know how to live it up come holiday time. Who knows, 50 years down the road, they just might turn churches into holiday oases — then we’ll see a resurgence of the young going INTO churches again.

Tags: Belgium, Feest vakantie dag & Hemelvaart, Herfstvakantie, holiday, Kerstmis, Krokusvakantie, Nieuwjaar, Paasmandaag, Paasvakantie, Pinkstermaandag