Christmas is the season to spend time with family or friends, indulge and generally enjoy yourself. It’s not a time for reordering staples, making conference calls, or dealing with a mountain of emails.
Here in the UK we get three days off over Christmas, unless your employer shuts down over the festive period or you’re Bob Cratchit. When you hear about what employees working in some other countries receive, it might hasten your plans to move abroad.
If you have aspirations of working overseas and Christmas is an important time of year for you, you’ll love this collection of countries that offer a lot of time off over the festive period…
Hong Kong
Hong Kong has a generous allowance of public holidays throughout the year, and many of them are clustered around the Christmas period. Employers can choose whether to allow you a day to celebrate the Winter Solstice or Christmas Day, depending upon their preference. Boxing Day is a public holiday, but not a statutory one, meaning your employer has no obligation to let you have it off, or compensate you for working it.
However, there are four statutory holidays in January, starting with the 2nd. Later in the month, Hong Kong celebrates the Lunar New Year, which is on the 28th, with the 30th and 31st also being holidays.
Hong Kong also offers the opportunity to enjoy spectacular festivities, like the must-see Symphony of Lights; a nightly performance where lights and screens adorn the city’s skyscrapers along the waterfront, choreographed to music.
Russia
As the home of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Russia celebrates Christmas day on 7th January, because the church uses the Julian calendar rather than the more common Gregorian. Workers get every day from New Year’s Day to the day after the Orthodox Christmas Day as holiday: an impressive eight days.
Christmas is more of a quiet, religious affair in Russia after being banned for much of the 20thcentury. What we would consider to be a traditional Christmas celebration takes place on New Year’s Day, where ‘New Year trees’ adorn homes and public spaces and children wait for Father Frost and the Snow Maiden to bring presents.
Having this celebration at the beginning of your public holiday means you don’t have to worry quite so much about all that indulgence – there’s plenty of time to recover before you’re due back in the office.
Sweden
It’s hardly surprising that Sweden makes this list - the country’s well-known for its incredibly generous employee benefits. Swedes get five weeks paid holiday per year, on top of a host of other benefits. Take maternity leave, for example, which entitles a couple to a combined total of 480 days leave (at least 90 days of which must be used by the father) and can be used at any point up until the child is eight years old.
Then take into account the various other policies introduced to improve the work-life balance of Swedes, such as trials of the six hour working day. The Mayor of one town even introduced a policy where employees get one hour’s paid leave per week for exercise.
Swedes get Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, what we call Boxing Day, New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Day and Epiphany – 6th January, the 13th day of Christmas, when Jesus was said to have appeared before the Magi, or three wise men. That’s a pretty respectable chunk of time!
Austria
Austria is a very enticing place to work, given the huge amount of holiday employees receive and the potential to accrue large bonuses. Employees get five week’s paid holiday and (in many cases) another month’s salary as a ‘vacation bonus’ and another month’s pay as a Christmas bonus.
Like those living in Hong Kong and Sweden, Austrians enjoy five days off work over the festive period. These start on the 8th December with Immaculate Conception Day.
Christmas Day is unsurprisingly a holiday, as is Boxing Day, although in Austria it’s called St Stephens Day. You’ll then get New Year’s Day off, as well as the Epiphany holiday on the 6thJanuary.
This gives you plenty of time to enjoy some Austrian Christmas traditions, such as stuffing yourself with Vanillekipferl (vanilla cookies), visiting the Christmas markets, and avoiding Krampus – Saint Nicolas’ beast-like helper who features in many European Christmas celebrations and punishes naughty children for their transgressions.
As Wizzard (almost) said: I wish I could have time off every day
It’s always worth checking your contract (maybe checking it twice) to make sure that your potential employer is offering the full complement of Christmas holidays, or at least providing adequate compensation if you don’t get certain days off.
Working in one of these countries means you could get more time off over Christmas than you currently enjoy, allowing you to make the most of the festive season. Being in another country also means you’ll have the opportunity to enjoy a range of new experiences, sights, tastes, sounds and smells, making the festive season even more special.
