“Gracias a Dios por los feriados” a.k.a “National Holidays”

As many of you know, Argentines aren’t famous for being hard-workers. In fact, many of us relish in the fact that many Mondays we get to sleep late and sip a cool ‘Quilmes’ in the afternoon (vodka in my case). Many people from abroad are amazed by the amount of ‘feriados’ we have, holidays spread throughout the year where people don’t go to work and kids don’t go to school. When I was in high school ‘feriados’ and ‘fin de semanas largos’ were one of the things we most looked forward to, because we got to skip Mat and Gym class, which in my case was kind of pointless anyways since I still don’t know what a derivative is and I can’t run two blocks without losing my breath, but whatever.
    Here in the land of ‘mate’ and ‘alfajores’ we have two types of national holidays: ‘feriados nacionales’ and ‘días no laborales’, so holidays and non-working days. ‘Feriados’ can be either on a fixed date or can be swapped around a day or two to a Monday for touristic reasons, and can fall the same day every year or change depending on whether they’re a religious festival that works on another calendar (like the lunar one) or some other bullshit. ‘Días no laborales’ are days when people like jews or muslims get to skip work/school because of some religious holiday, but the rest of us have to work. Many of my friends back at school used to say they were Jewish in April to get to skip on the 20th and 21st because of Pesach; I now wonder why I didn’t copy them. So many Math classes I could have avoided… Oh well.
    So yeah, we get ‘Día Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y la Justicia’ on the 24th of March off, in order to remember the political victims of the dictatorship; ‘Día del Veterano de Guerra y de los Caídos en la Guerra de las Malvinas’ on the 2nd of April to lament those who died in the Falkands/Malvinas war; Holy Thursday and Friday to remember the sacrifice the Easter Bunny made for us; ‘Día del trabajador’ on the 1st of May, which is Labour Day; ‘Primer gobierno patrio’ on the 25th of May to celebrate the gaucho government or something; ‘Día de la Bandera’ on the 20th of June to wave ‘banderas’ and wear ‘escarapelas’ proudly; ‘Día de la Independencia’ on the 9th of July because we got rid of the annoying Spanish; ‘Día de la raza’ on the 12th of October, the day Columbus discovered America, which is kind of ironic being called ‘Race Day’ as it should be called ‘Day the Indigenous people were doomed’; ‘Día de la Inmaculada Concepcion’ on the 8th of December, which is to admire how witty this girl called Mary was when she came up with this whole thing about immaculate conception to avoid getting stoned, and finally Christmas and New Year. I don’t think anyone really reflects on why we have the ‘feriados’ (except maybe hardcore nationalists and people with nothing else to do), we’re just happy we do have them.
    Many supermarkets are still open on these days, but unless you work in a shop or store you can spend the whole day doing nothing! Hooray! It kinds of makes you want more horrible things to have happened to Argentina just so we can get the excuse to ‘think and reflect’ on them for a whole 24 hours.
    I have just found out that on the 24th of April Armenians are allowed to not show up for work or school… This is very interesting since I have an Armenian name. Can you guess what I will be doing 24th April 2011? NOTHING. If you’re Muslim you can skip the 10th of January and 1st of October, and if you’re Jewish, apart from Pesach, you can demand a day of rest on the 26th and 27th of April, 28th and 30th of September and 1st of October.
    It’s kind of like a game, isn’t it? Who can rack up the most ‘feriados’. I might just convert for the extra days of getting to lie in bed.
    To the ‘vagos’ and ‘vagas’ like me
    El Pendejo Porteño