| Comment | For what it's worth, I don't think the statement made in #7 about Catholics and Protestants was even correct. All liturgical Christians celebrate Easter as the most important church festival, and many Protestant denominations are liturgical. Many other Protestants, however, are not particularly liturgical, so for them the liturgical calendar as a whole gets less emphasis -- all sacred days, not one day as opposed to another.
There may have been some countries in which particular Protestant denominations, at particular times in history, observed Good Friday more than Easter -- perhaps strict Protestant sects such as the Calvinists or Puritans, some of whom also hardly celebrated Christmas either in a way that we would recognize. But such sects were far more common in past centuries than they are today; and even in the early years of the Reformation, other Protestants, such as Lutherans and Anglicans, were less severe. It's very often a mistake to say anything sweeping about 'Protestants' as a whole, because there are so many different kinds of Protestants.
It's true that early Protestantism as a whole did de-emphasize public holidays. Religious celebrations became on the whole simpler, and focused more on worship inside the church than on merrymaking outside it, which had often been carried to secular excess, as they saw it -- think of Carnival/Mardi Gras, and saints' days celebrated with parades, fairs, and other public revelry. The Reformation produced related social changes, such as the so-called Protestant work ethic, that also had advantages when practiced in moderation, but disadvantages when taken to extremes -- not unlike the Catholic celebrations they had reacted against. It also produced the separation of church and state, which is partly what's at the root of the idea that it's good for the state to permit variety in religious observance, so that not every religious holiday needs to be a public holiday.
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