Engineering a Merry Christmas

Everyone knows that services and facilities can experience deviations from the normal quality and availability of service during holiday times. This results from anomalous stresses being applied to affected services and facilities. These stresses come in two main forms; increased demand for services and products, and decreased labor supply due to vacations. All services and facilities experience the labor shortage while parcel services, food preparation, and retail experience also experience a sharp demand increase. These services are squeezed so hard that to meet the demand they have to engineer out the labor supply shortage with seasonal labor and conditional employment clauses. 

When a service or facility is stressed logistically, this stress is translated to physical and emotional stress on the labor force which supplies the service or operates the facility and the consumers who rely on the service or facility. Since most of the population fall into one or both of these demographics, everyone shoulders a piece of this stress. The origin of the stress is the lack of sufficient turndown in all affected services and facilities. Examples:

• Retail stores are not built to accommodate a daily traffic equivalent to Black Friday or else they would look more like amusement parks or convention centers. 
• Medical offices don't keep 1.5X the needed doctors on staff so their appointment traffic is unaffected by multiple concurrent vacations. 
• Restaurants don't maintain extra dining rooms, kitchen space, and cook staff to ensure their wait times on New Years Eve are similar to any normal time.

These examples come off as absurdities, however they are what would be required to diffuse the above-mentioned stresses given the current model of concurrent holiday celebration. The historic benefit of the concurrent celebration model is it maximizes the probability that one will get to visit with all their family and friends in one occasion. This has always been the "reward" for shouldering the above-mentioned stresses. 

The concurrent celebration model developed from superstition that specific dates had legitimate significance but remained because it solved the logistics problem of coordination. In the past where communication with distant friends or relatives was difficult or impossible, the concurrent celebration model was the crutch that ensured people would see each other if they returned to a habitual place on the right dates. It suffices to say that these coordination problems, for which the concurrent celebration solved, have been solved with current technologies. Meetings can be arranged and even rescheduled to accommodate attendees' needs quite easily. Yet we still shoulder the stress of the concurrent celebration model.

It is with these considerations that a new model is being proposed. The dispersed celebration model removes the service and facility stress of the concurrent celebration model while relying on modern communication tools for self-organization of celebrations. In this model, the same number of holiday leave is given to workers under the concurrent celebration model however they will be given as floating holidays. In this model floating holiday overlap is minimized to prevent the labor supply impact. This will naturally force people to organize within their family/friend groups to move holidays around to accommodate the overlap clause. In this model Christmas will be celebrated all year by someone but never at once by everyone. The trickle down effect of this will be the services and facilities that experience an increased demand during holidays in the concurrent celebration model will see this demand redistributed across the calendar and turndown will no longer be an issue. 

Redistribution in the time domain is the only logical solution to the problems the concurrent celebration model presents. It is a no-cost solution which will benefit society as a whole by removing the stresses presented by the concurrent celebration model. The first step will need to be revoking state acknowledged holidays. Second will be getting the largest employers to agree to redistribution of holidays and eliminate service level impacting floating holiday concurrency. Holiday pay can still exist if employers offer comparable compensation for those who abstain from floating holidays. These two steps cost nothing to anyone and will put society on the fast track to eliminating holiday stress.