Countries & Holidays

Every country keeps time, and celebrates, in its own way

Time may be universal, but the way each nation marks it is wonderfully particular. A country chooses how far its clocks sit from Coordinated Universal Time, whether to shift them for daylight saving in summer, and which days of the year it sets aside to remember its history and its faith. Put those choices together and you get a kind of portrait: the rhythm of a place across a year. This section gathers that information country by country, starting with the live local time and moving on to the national and public holidays that come round each year, each one explained in plain language.

Two kinds of holiday, and how to tell them apart

Holidays fall into two broad families, and recognising which is which helps you predict them. Fixed-date national days, such as independence days, constitution days and the birthdays of founders, land on the same calendar date every year, so they are easy to plan around far in advance. Religious and movable festivals, by contrast, often follow a lunar or lunisolar calendar, which is shorter than the solar year, so their dates drift from one year to the next and are sometimes confirmed only days before by the sighting of the moon or by a church calendar. Eid in the Muslim world and Easter in the Christian world are the classic examples. Knowing which kind a holiday is tells you whether to trust last year's date or to check again closer to the time.

Guides ready now, with more to come

The guides currently cover Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States, with each page pairing a live clock and the country's time-zone details with a clear holiday calendar. Some of these countries sit on a single national time zone and never change their clocks, while others span several zones or move them twice a year for daylight saving, and the guides explain exactly how each one works. More countries are on the way. If there is one you would like to see added next, the contact page is the place to ask, and you can use any country's live clock together with the countdown timer to count down to its next big day.