# Christian holidays in companies



## JochenvW (Jan 9, 2012)

Dear All,

now that we successfully survived Easter I came across the question of christian holidays in companies. According to diffrent storries from Expats there seems to be diffrent rules on which holidays are days of for christians. While a coptic co-worker told me the had Palm-Sunday, Holy Thursday and Easter Sunday of, others tell me they could choose one day or no extra day at all. As my contract states that I should respect the Egyptian holidays (and I'm a Christian), I was wondering how your companies are handling the issue...

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Cheers, Jochen


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## DeadGuy (Jan 22, 2010)

Your coworker is correct........

The Christian holidays in Egypt (As far as I remember) are:

Coptic Christmas: January's 7th.

Epiphany festival: January's 19th.

Palm's Sunday: Which falls same day as Easter for the rest of the world.

Holy Thursday: Thursday that follows Palm's Sunday.

Coptic Easter: A week after Easter.

Of course there's the Good Friday, but it's already a day off in Egypt, and Sham El Neseem, but that's not a Christian holiday really 

However "some" companies only give 2 days off, Coptic Christmas and Coptic Easter, which is followed by Sham El Neseem.


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## Whitedesert (Oct 9, 2011)

The "official" two Christians holidays is only Coptic Christmas (7th Jan) and Sham El Nessim, which originally had little to do with Christians (an ancient harvest feastival), but kind of adopted by the Copts as Easter. There is no hard and fast rules (like everything else in Egypt). If you work for a Christian owned company, like I do you would have got this weeks Sunday and Monday off, if not, you most likely only got the Monday off. This is off cause the Eastern Christian calendar, because as we all know Easter was some weeks ago, and I had to work on the "real" Easter Sunday, which was a bummer.


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