It is not very difficult to hear some merchant or business owner complaining that the Brazilian population is excessively prestigious with several holidays throughout the year. In fact, Brazil enjoys a series of commemorative days that paralyze many people at the federal, state and municipal levels. However, this does not even mean that the taste for the holiday is one of the defects that exclusively populate the identity of the Brazilian people.
Since antiquity, holidays had the important function of demarcating the passage of time or the celebration of some event bearing great significance. Among the Romans, we noticed that various holidays were constantly linked to the worship of the deities that figured their religiosity. In its glory days, we observed that this same civilization organized festive days in memory of the emperors who had died.
More than remembering gods and men, the holidays also played the important role of establishing a vital and necessary moment of rupture with the everyday world. In the Middle Ages, it was common to organize various carnival events that preceded the resignation of the Lenten period. In these situations, the peasants created songs, enactments and images that made fun of the feudal lords and clerics of the time.
The frequent association between the promotion of holidays and religious celebration only took on new features when the French Revolution broke old paradigms. After the development of this fact that inaugurates the Contemporary Age, the French made official the 14th of July as the date they commemorate the fall of the Bastille and, in turn, the beginning of the process. revolutionary. Historically, this convention also marks the creation of the first civil holiday.
Even though the French model reverberated with great force, the creation of other secular holidays proceeded quite slowly. Throughout the nineteenth century, the development of industrial capitalism established the flourishing of struggles between the bourgeois and working class. Throughout the 1880s, the intensification of this tension allowed the institution of May 1st as the holiday to be marked by workers' demonstrations all over the world.
When we notice the presence of voices that disagree with the holidays that organize the Brazilian calendar, we notice an interesting notion between leisure and work. From this perspective, rest becomes an activity not committed to the nation's progress. At the same time, work becomes an overvalued activity, coming to be seen as an instrument of moral improvement. After all, are the holidays that bad?
By Rainer Sousa
Graduated in History
Source: Brazil School - https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/datas-comemorativas/a-origem-dos-feriados.htm
