We generally refer to this time of year, roughly the period including Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year, as “the holidays.” My dictionary defines the word itself as: absence, celebration, day off, interim, pause and vacation. My thesaurus gives a mind-boggling list of well over a hundred official holidays worldwide, many of which are unknown to most people. Some of those are regional or state holidays which, I suppose, are or were, at one time, important to the people who live there, but I wonder just how many of them are still significant enough to be celebrated annually.
