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As the title of this video suggests, we are posing the question, "does Thailand have a lot of holidays?" I have had a lot of people ask me this especially in the latter half of the year because there are quite honestly, after the first quarter, there are a number of holidays. They are kind of all bunched up into the beginning of the second quarter usually in April and early May and then you have got a pretty prolonged period without any holidays through the summer and then you kind of get to this point in the year, October seems to have a number of holidays especially at present with the Remembrance Days for the Monarchs here in Thailand and then obviously in December there are quite a number of both Western and Thai holidays. 

Now what I would say to that is yeah there are more holidays I think than the West but it's not by a whole lot; it's not by a super wide margin. More to the point, Thai holidays are just totally different than Western holidays. The only Western holiday that is shared by Thailand sort of uniformly, is New Year’s Day. New Year's Day is a Thai holiday and I am talking International New year's Day, January 1, yeah that's a holiday in Thailand. Most of the other Thai holidays are exclusively Thai holidays. Nobody outside of Thailand celebrates them or really understands them. To some extent you could argue that like Songkran, the Thai New Year is similar to Tet or to its equivalent in Cambodia, that's true but it's it doesn't happen at the same time. In fact different festivals for Thai New Year, happen in Pattaya at a different time than they happen in Bangkok. 

So again yeah there may seem like a lot of holidays. I would say more to the point though, yes Thailand does have a number of holidays but it's more that people aren’t used to dealing with them so it's like when you are in America and you go to the Post Office and it's closed and like "why is it closed? Oh yeah, it's Columbus Day” or whatever the holiday is you just weren't really thinking of it. But yeah when you think of it, it registers and you say "okay, that's a national holiday, I forgot about that". Over here I think it rankles a little bit more because people just don't have any idea what the holiday schedule looks lovely like so they kind of say, "well wait a minute, I didn't know that was a holiday." Well it's a Thai holiday, the Thai Government shut down, the Thai banks are shut down, we shut down because my staff and I am Thai too but my staff is born Thai and grew up with these holidays and they want them off because they are Government Holidays.