Talk:Public holidays in the Philippines

Dates
There appears to be an inordinate amount of confusion over regular holidays and nationwide special holidays regarding
 * the date of the holiday being celebrated;
 * the celebration date of the holiday as specified by RA9492;
 * The celebration date specified for the year 2012 by Presidential Proclamation No. 295, s.2011, (some dates modified from the RA9492 date).

RA9492 specifies that the dates of movable-date holidays shall be fixed year-by-year by presidential proclamation, and allows such proclamations to move the dates of fixed-date holidays as well -- as was done by PP295, s.2011.

I vaguely recall that I've tried to fix instances of similar confusion in this article several times in the past, and I made an edit today which was related to this to the Ninoy Aquino Day holiday table entry. Sometime after making that edit, I noticed that the confusion is currently wider than that one holiday, but aborted efforts to fix it after remembering that I had been down this road before.

I think that the way to fix this might be to limit the table in the Regular holidays section and to specify those three dates separately for each holiday -- with refs to supporting sources *the date of the holiday being celebrated (not found in either RA9492 or PP295, s.2011, so that info would perhaps need to be supported by other sources);
 * the date of the event (or whatever) which is behind the holiday being celebrated;
 * the celebration date specified by RA9492 for fixed-date holidays;
 * the celebration date declared by presidential proclamation for the current year.

I'll leave it to regular editors of this article to make whatever changes to this article might be needed. I'll leave this article on my watchlist, but I'll try not to confuse the issue further by jumping in and twiddling those changes. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 08:38, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

I took a look at this article today and noticed that PP459 s.2012 is cited as a supporting source for some 2014 dates which were actually specified by PP 655 s.2013 (I have not fixed that).

I was confused by the Transferability column and the use of the term Movable. RA9492] uses the term Movable Date, applying it to exactly three holidays (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Eidul Fitr), and specified particular days or particular dates for the celebration of 11 other holidays or special days. Neither of the PPs say anything about movability or transferability of celebration dates; they specify fixed dates applicable in a single year for all the proclaimed holidays.

The following is the situation as I read it from those sources:


 * RA9492 also specified that Eidul Adha would be celebrated in ARMM. Both the 2013 and 2014 proclamations specified that the celebration date for Eid ul Fitr and Eidul Adha would be specified separately.
 * I don't think I've made any errors above, but I haven't re-proofed it against the sources I've mentioned above.

I suggest that something like the above, perhaps with the addition of a Details column might be better than the Regular holidays table in the article as currently formatted. When a PP detailing the 2015 holidays is issued, the 2013 column could be dropped, moving the 2014 column left, and a 2015 column could be added -- and so on in future years. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 03:29, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

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Holiday celebration dates
This article has a reader utility problem, and has had for a long time, if a reader looks at the article seeking an answer to the question "What is the celebration date for [holiday X]?". An example: the current version of this article gives the date of Chinese New Year as "February 05 2019". Actually, I don't think that the 2019 holiday celebration dates for the Philippines have yet been fixed; fixed the celebration date for 2017 as 28 January  fixed the celebration date for 2018 as 16 February.

With "Holiday Economics" moving the celebration dates for most holidays celebrating fixed date events to nearby weekends, this sort of a problem exists for most regular holiday and special day dates.; the celebration dates change year-by-year

I suggest changing the table format for the Regular holidays and Special Non-working Days tables to something like:

This example would have been more meaningful if the proclamation fixing the 2019 dates had already been issued. When it is issued, however, the 2017 info can be easily deleted and the 2019 info added.

I believe that there is a second problem with these tables which is not addressed by the above example; "Holiday Economics" seems to have made the concept of fixed vs. movable date transferability meaningless. Perhaps that should be discussed here. Wtmitchell (talk) (earlier Boracay Bill) 05:20, 12 March 2018 (UTC)

Spanish names
Is it necessary and relevant to include Spanish names? — hueman1 ( talk •  contributions ) 02:52, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
 * No, but it was introduced earlier this year by . I suppose let's give his justification for this until the next holiday? Howard the Duck (talk) 13:04, 9 April 2021 (UTC)
 * ignored his notifications to join in the discussion. For lack of justification in having those Spanish names stay, I've removed it. Howard the Duck (talk) 12:24, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * My dearest apologies for having ignored the discussions. The reason why those Spanish names were in the first place is because Spanish was an historical language used for many decades because of the Spanish colonization of the Philippines and there has been an online effort on social media to revive the use of Spanish amongst Filipinos in other to align the country with Spain and fellow Spanish-speaking nations in Latin America. Thank you for your action, through, as still many Filipinos still use English as an second language co-shared with Filipino, the official language, and the regional languages as well, and the majority still cannot write and speak Spanish. The Spanish translations which I made through matched the Filipino and English names of the holidays and reflect the reason for their observance to those who are already using Spanish or are planning to learn the language. JMRAMOS0109, 12:41, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * It did not match the translations. "Rizal Day" was not translated as "Dia de Rizal".
 * Wikipedia should match actual usage, whether or not there's an "online effort on social media" or anywhere.
 * If there should be other languages, it should be for other regional languages.
 * If Spanish should be there, more so should Arabic be there, considering we use the Arabic names for names of 2 holidays in English. We use don't use Spanish names as English names of any holiday at all, except for the Holy Week holidays, which are understood to be in the vernacular when you refer to observing "Huwebes Santo." Howard the Duck (talk) 12:58, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * but why are they still in the Other holidays table? Is there something special about them? &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk) 13:01, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Oh God I missed that. Howard the Duck (talk) 13:05, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Oh God that section is a clusterfuck. Can somebody check if Black Friday even had legal standing. Some holidays are one-off holidays but are treated to be as recurring. Howard the Duck (talk) 13:08, 13 April 2021 (UTC)
 * Sorry, it was all I could do to format the stuff. I see also that under Locally observed holidays there's a Bacolod City Charter Day on June 18 and October 19. &mdash; JohnFromPinckney (talk) 13:23, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Massive clean-ups
As stated in the section above, there are issues with some of the holidays. I've been able to source the enacting laws of most nationwide holidays (interestingly, some are not based on law but are only done via annual presidential proclamations -- interesting!), but we'd need some for local holidays and "working holidays". Now, these "working holidays" must be based on some law; I was able to find some for a handful of these. For local holidays, like nationwide ones, these can either be regular or special, and our basis shall be the laws that created these. The local holidays should also have a column for the places where the holiday are observed. The Bank of the Philippine Islands' Twitter account has notices on where and when they are closed, so you could cross-reference that to the law that is stated on the tweet.

There are also one-off holidays. The most famous ones in recent memory are June 19, 2011 for the sesquicentenary of Jose Rizal's berth, and July 27, 2014 for the centenary of Iglesia ni Cristo's founding, and one could argue they should be listed here.

Now if those are not based on legislative or executive fiat, those should be deleted. Howard the Duck (talk) 18:56, 14 April 2021 (UTC)