Christmas takes a different legal shape in every country that writes it down. Britain schedules it only for Scotland, a French employer may lawfully open on it, and Japan's holiday statute leaves December empty.
No founding act for the observance itself sits in any of the statutes that name 25 December; each of them recognises a day already being kept. Britain's Bank Holidays Act 1871 shows it on the act's own face, providing that nobody could be compelled on a bank holiday to do what he could not be compelled to do on Christmas Day.
Congress made Christmas a holiday in the District of Columbia in 1870, and then spent the rest of the act on bank paper. The statute names "the twenty-fifth day of December, commonly called Christmas day", and every clause after that list is about bills of exchange, bank checks and promissory notes. Paper falling due on the day, it directs, "shall be deemed as having matured on the day previous."
The act says nothing about time off. It says nothing about pay or leave either. Christmas entered federal law as a rule about when a bank check comes due.
The pattern repeats abroad. Britain's Parliament passed its own holiday act less than eleven months later, and it legislated the same subject: commercial paper, payable on the next following day. Neither act legislates a celebration; both legislate what happens to a payment that falls due on 25 or 26 December.
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An opinion signed in August 1903 records what the federal government had already been doing. Acting Attorney General James C. McReynolds wrote that for "many years" before 1870 it had been "customary to close the Executive Departments of the Government at Washington" on five holidays, Christmas Day among them. Those days, he noted, had been "declared to be such by District laws."
The law kept arriving after the fact, and it arrived in pieces. The act approved on 28 June 1870 came first, and it was written for a local audience.
The Congressional Research Service traces the act to the city's own commercial class. It was "apparently drafted in response to a memorial drafted by local 'bankers and business men'", and its operative clauses read like it.
On 6 January 1885 Congress allowed a list of holidays including Christmas to per diem employees of the Navy Yard, the Government Printing Office and other federal offices, "on duty at Washington, or elsewhere in the United States". The report calls this the act that "apparently for the first time, extended at least limited holiday benefits to all federal employees".
In 1870 the federal government employed roughly 5,300 people in Washington. Roughly 50,600 more worked elsewhere in the country, and the 1870 act had not reached any of them.
In 1968 Congress moved Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day and Veterans Day to Mondays and created Columbus Day. Committee reports argued that Monday holidays would bring "substantial benefits to both the spiritual and economic life of the Nation", and the House Judiciary Committee reported polling in which "almost 93 percent of the persons polled supported the concept of uniform Monday holiday legislation".
Christmas is not on the list of days that act changed. It stayed on 25 December, one of five holidays in the current federal list pinned to a calendar date rather than a weekday, and one that had been kept in Washington long before the 1870 act said so.
TIMELINE
GOOD TO KNOW
The fourth item in the act's enacting clause is not a date at all. It reads "any day appointed or recommended by the President of the United States as a day of public fast or thanksgiving", so the enacting clause never names Thanksgiving, though the act's title does.
Section 6103(b) supplies only a Saturday to Friday rule and expressly excludes the day scheduled for an employee instead of Sunday. The Sunday to Monday rule comes from section 3(a) of Executive Order 11582, signed by Richard Nixon on 11 February 1971, which the Office of Personnel Management still cites.
Its preamble gives the purpose as "rendering the day after Christmas Day, and also certain other days, bank holidays". The act that gave Britain its bank holidays was drafted around 26 December.
The federal holiday list carried dates rather than names until Pub. L. 89-554 combined the old sections. Its revision note records the change in one line: "The names of all holidays are inserted for ready reference."
Jeffrey Niemer, Patty Hemsath and Anne Dolan intervened as defendants in the Ganulin case, described in the record as "federal employees seeking to protect their interest in the employment benefit of a Christmas holiday". The Christian Coalition filed an amicus brief asking for dismissal.
GOOD TO KNOW
"Christmas Day, December 25" is the last of the eleven legal public holidays listed in 5 U.S.C. 6103(a), which binds federal employees and the District of Columbia rather than the states.
Schedule 1 of the Banking and Financial Dealings Act 1971 keeps three separate lists, and Christmas Day is scheduled in Scotland's alone, or 26 December when it falls on a Sunday.
The Schedule's paragraph here sets 26 December, plus 27 December in years when 25 or 26 December is a Sunday. Northern Ireland is listed the same way, with 17 March added.
"Le jour de Noel" is the eleventh and last of the fetes legales in Code du travail L3133-1, but only 1 May is both ferie and chome, and absent a collective agreement the employer decides which public holidays are days off.
The French state's own table for Alsace-Moselle lists a "1er jour de Noel" on 25 December and a "2e jour de Noel" on 26 December, and the solidarity working day may be scheduled on neither.
Article 73 of the Labour Code now ends "25 December - Christmas" in the public holiday list and again in the list of religious non-working days. The same article carries a note that its provisions do not apply while martial law is in force.
The Act on National Holidays names sixteen national holidays and not one of them falls in December. Japan also puts the Sunday substitution rule in the statute itself, where the United States leaves it to an executive order.
WHY THIS DAY MATTERS
The Supreme Court declined to hear the case against Christmas.
In 1998 a Cincinnati lawyer named Richard Ganulin sued the United States, arguing that making Christmas Day a legal public holiday established religion. Judge Susan J. Dlott dismissed the case the following year, holding that the government was "merely acknowledging the secular cultural aspects of Christmas", and the Supreme Court denied certiorari on 16 April 2001.
Until 9 December 2004 the ban on large shops opening in England and Wales on Christmas Day applied only when the day fell on a Sunday. The Christmas Day (Trading) Act 2004 changed that in one line: "A large shop must not be open on Christmas Day for the serving of retail customers."
The Federal Register's online index reaches back to 1994 and holds twelve executive orders closing federal offices on Christmas Eve, plus a published correction. Four of them are titled "Half-Day Closing", because the day is not in the statute and each year's closure is a decision the president makes.
THERE IS ROOM IN THIS COUNTRY AND IN ALL OUR HEARTS TOO FOR DIFFERENT CONVICTIONS AND A DAY OFF TOO!
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Yes in several countries, though the legal shape differs in each. It is a US legal public holiday under 5 U.S.C. 6103(a), a scheduled bank holiday in Scotland, a fete legale in France and a public holiday in Ukraine, while Japan's statute names sixteen national holidays and Christmas is not among them.
COLOPHON
In church reckoning the evening of December 24 is already Christmas, not its run-up. In law it is a rest day in Czechia, absent from the nine holidays Germany protects nationwide, and a yearly presidential decision in the US.
It's the most wonderful time of the year - celebrate Jesus' birthday with love, joy, and gratitude for all he has given us. Merry Christmas!
Experience the joy of St. Nicholas Day - share the spirit of giving with family and friends through festive activities, treats, and gifts!
