JOIN USDifferent reasons for holiday season
I have always known public holidays to be the birth or death anniversary of a person of national importance, some religious festival, or our Independence and Republic Days. With the holiday season having just ended, I have had some interesting experiences living in Sydney for only 5 months now.
We have very few public holidays in Australia, and some are for reasons I would never have thought could be a public holiday! Two of these holidays made me appreciate the small things in life and the fact that we can celebrate the simple pleasures of life too.
The Melbourne Cup is a state public holiday in Victoria, but it is celebrated all over Australia. When I first heard the name, I assumed it was some kind of sports day for athletic games where people won cups and medals, like school sports days. I was so wrong! Never had I imagined that this was a turf race that literally stopped the nation!
Although the race happened in Melbourne on a public holiday, Sydney was no less prepared to celebrate. Everyone seemed to be talking about the race that day—where they will be during the race, when they will leave work, which pub has a vacancy, and so on—on the train to work, by walkers on the street, and by people at food courts.
All this for the 200-second race of the day! To my middle-class Indian mind, this was too much to accept—people here were actually discussing a horse race, a gambling event, and making plans to get drunk and bid on the winning horse! How cool is that? No judgement, just fun!
Another interesting day was Boxing Day. I literally thought it was a national boxing event and there would be people in the arena fighting each other; how stupid was I? Some of the locals told me it was the day after Christmas to box things up and put them away or throw them away and clean up the house after all the celebrations from Christmas Day. I thought, "Wow, that is such a lovely thing—to give a national public day off just to clean up your place!"
Only when I looked into it did I realise Boxing Day is a day to give gifts to the poor and needy, something that was started in Britain. Although Boxing Day is now more of a time when every retailer has sales and discounts to attract customers, similar to our Akshayatritiya, I truly loved the idea of "boxing everything away and cleaning the house after celebrations."
Imagine having a Boxing Day after all our festivals in India—we truly need a day off to rest from all the celebrating, don’t we?