Topic: The Christian calendar’s other days
How does United States mark The Christian calendar’s other days?
Good Friday
- Local date
- March 26, 2027
- When is it?
- The Friday second day before Easter; not a federal holiday, and a legal holiday only in the statutes of certain states
Section 6103 of Title 5 of the United States Code lists eleven legal public holidays: New Year's Day, the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Exactly one of them is a Christian observance, Christmas. Good Friday is not there, nor the Ascension, nor Corpus Christi. The difference appears one level down. Louisiana Revised Statutes 1:55 lists Good Friday and All Saints' Day on 1 November among its days of public rest and legal holidays, alongside Mardi Gras; Delaware makes Good Friday a legal holiday outright, at 1 Del. C. §501(a)(3). On the same Friday, federal employees are at work while state offices in Delaware and Louisiana are shut. As for Corpus Christi, it does not appear even in those two, the longest lists of Christian observances any American state keeps.
What is this topic?
Beyond Christmas and Easter, the same Easter computus produces a whole series of days: Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Ascension, Pentecost, Corpus Christi. How far a national calendar follows that series varies enormously. Indonesia, with the largest Muslim population in the world, makes both Good Friday and Ascension statutory national holidays and adds a collective leave day after Ascension. Brazil, the largest Catholic country, treats Corpus Christi at federal level as an optional working day, not a statutory holiday — it becomes a real holiday only where a city council has legislated one. The United States federal list of eleven holidays contains exactly one Christian day, Christmas. Pentecost appears nowhere: it always falls on a Sunday.
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.