The four-day holiday that is Easter Weekend is over for another year. Once again, there were the ongoing debates over whether the trading bans are defensible in 2023, and the media obsessively reporting on the “holiday road toll”. There was also an annoying annual TV ad, too. Meanwhile, the weather was all over the place, as could be expected for April.
The Easter Weekend carries two days with trading bans, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. On those days, it’s illegal for many/most businesses to trade, depending on where they are and what the nature of their business is. To say the rules are labyrinthine, confusing, and contradictory would far too kind an assessment. On the very big plus side, there are no TV ads on trading ban days, though the TV channels run promotional ads for their own programmes, so it’s not all that different, really. Among the complications over Easter weekend is the fact the public holidays are Good Friday and Easter Monday; Easter Sunday just has a trading ban.
Labour unions want the trading bans maintained so that low-wage workers (in retail and hospitality in particular) can be sure to have holidays off with their families. I understand the sentiment, and I also understand that such workers have little (well, no…) power to negotiate time off on those holidays, however, if we want to ensure better treatment of low-paid workers, there must be a better way than the trading bans.
I don’t think that trading bans on Good Friday and Easter Sunday are justifiable because those days are aligned specifically with one particular religion, Christianity, which the vast majority of New Zealanders don’t practice, even if a slight majority (may still) call themselves “Christian”. The other full trading ban day, Christmas Day, is now mostly secular, and having trading bans in place that day has a much more universal tone. The half-day trading ban is Anzac Day morning, and while that day has religious overtones due to choices made by some communities in the way it’s commemorated, the day itself it completely secular. I’ve never heard anyone say that the half-day ban on Anzac Day should be abolished.
Another argument for the status quo is that Easter Weekend is the only certain four-day weekend we have each year. While Christmas and New Year holiday weekends are often four-day weekends—two in a row, no less—that’s not true every year: If the two-day public holidays (Christmas Day/Boxing Day and also New Year’s Day and the day after) fall on Tuesday/Wednesday or Wednesday/Thursday (the latter will be the case in 2024), then the weekends are normal. Even so, the trading bans aren’t necessarily integral to that.
There’s one thing that all holiday weekends share: Sombre talk about in the media about the “road toll”, the number of people who die on the roads in official holiday periods. We hear a lot about it in the lead up to a holiday weekend, throughout the weekend, and once the weekend is over.
For Easter 2023, the official holiday period began at 4pm on Thursday, April 6 and ended 6am today (this covers the period when people head out to holiday destinations and when they return to their regular lives). One person died over that period, making 2023’s toll the lowest since 2020’s zero deaths, but was a year when all of New Zealand was under a Lever 4 Covid Lockdown. This year, the person who died did so yesterday, which means that if they had died at 6:01am today, it apparently wouldn’t have counted in the toll. Statistics can be kind of arbitrary.
In any case, overall, the road toll in all holiday periods has been trending down for years, despite a big spike over this past Christmas, and a much smaller bump over Labour Weekend 2020 (Labour Weekend is a three-day holiday weekend), and that’s good news.
There’s one more thing that happens every Easter: An annoying TV ad. It’s run by a seemingly evangelical Christian group—though they’d probably prefer the adjective “ecumenical”. While they use neither word, they describe themselves as being “supported by a diverse group of Christian churches throughout New Zealand”. I’d mainly call them evangelical—in the strictest sense of the word—because they are clearly evangelising. This isn’t meant to suggest what their particular ideological/theological slant might be, because I simply don’t know (and I have no interest in watching all their videos to try and work it out). My annoyance with their ad is aesthetic rather than political or theological.
The oddly staged ad features a woman reciting “An Easter Poem to Consider” [the ad is on YouTube], and promotes an expressly Christian message “you may wish to take to heart”. The poem, however, sounds like something written by an angsty teenager who focuses on Jesus rather than the latest hunky actor or singer like her schoolmates do. It’s banal and the language is far too desperately earnest—in my opinion, of course (Arthur’s Law, and all that). What annoys me, though, isn’t that I don’t think it’s very good as an ad or a poem (again, Arthur’s Law…), it’s that you can’t avoid the thing: It plays on TV several times during, at least, the early evening. Saturation repetition doesn’t make the ad or the poem or the message even slightly more appealing—it’s quite the opposite, actually. Ironically, because it’s an ad, it can’t be broadcast on Good Friday or Easter Sunday because of the trading bans. Maybe that’s an argument for keeping the bans in place? That could be why they run their ad so much in the lead up to Easter.
This past weekend had a lot of weird weather, too: There were four tornados in three days, for example. There have also been warnings of more severe weather this afternoon, too. Sigh.
All that aside, Easter Weekend has never been a big deal for adult me, though I remember one year in Chicago a friend insisted I make roast lamb for an Easter dinner, which I thought was vaguely sacrilegious (the Paschal Lamb…), but I did it, anyway, and even made fresh mint sauce, something I’ve never done since.
Here in New Zealand, if Nigel and I did anything at Easter, it might be to go visit family (since it was a four-day holiday weekend), but we didn’t do that every year. I tried to give Nigel Easter chocolate every year, though. I haven’t bought any since he died. On Saturday, I went to my mother-in-law’s to have dinner with her and a visiting sister-in-law, which was lovely. Other than that, though, it was a very quiet weekend, and that suited me perfectly.
Our next public holiday is Anzac Day on Thursday, April 25, then it’s eight weeks until King’s Birthday on June 5 (3-day weekend), then Matariki nearly six weeks later, on July 15 (another 3-day weekend). There’ll be nothing for three months, until Labour Day on October 23 (a 3-day weekend), then nothing for a further two months when we have Christmas Day and Boxing Day (a 4-day weekend this year). And that’s our public holiday schedule for the rest of 2023. Nice.
No comments:
Post a Comment