My Venezuelan Holiday Hunt
So, I found myself needing a solid list of Venezuelan holidays. Sounds simple, right? Like, pop it into a search engine, first link, done. That’s what I thought. I really did. My optimism, sometimes it’s just cute.
This wasn’t for some big corporate project, mind you. Nah, this was way more “seat of your pants.” My sister-in-law, Maria, decided she was going to start this online boutique. You know, selling handmade trinkets, “globally sourced,” which mostly meant stuff her friends made back in Caracas and a few other places. Noble idea, but Maria, bless her soul, is all enthusiasm and zero planning. She wanted to run promotions around Venezuelan holidays, thinking it’d be a nice touch for her suppliers and maybe some customers. Smart, I guess. But then she casually dropped the task of figuring out which holidays and when they were, squarely in my lap. “You’re good with computers,” she said. Famous last words.
So, my “practice” began. First stop, the usual search giants. And yeah, I got hits. Tons of them. But here’s the kicker:
- Some sites looked like they were designed in 1998 and probably last updated then too. Dates for things like Carnival? All over the place.
- Then you had the “official-looking” sites, but they were often in Spanish, which is fine, I can muddle through, but then the documents were these scanned PDFs of government decrees. Not exactly a user-friendly calendar.
- And the movable feasts! Don’t even get me started. Easter, okay, that’s a known quantity, but then there were other days that seemed to shift based on… well, I wasn’t always sure what.
I spent a good couple of hours just cross-referencing. One site would list something, another wouldn’t. A third would have a completely different date for what seemed like the same holiday. I was starting to think this “simple” task was going to need a dedicated research grant. I even found forums where people were arguing about whether a certain day was a “true” national holiday or more of a regional thing, or a “bank holiday” but not a “day off for everyone” holiday. You see the rabbit hole I was falling into?
It reminded me of this one time at a previous job, a tiny startup that thought “agile” meant “make it up as you go along.” We needed to schedule international calls, and someone just printed a list of US holidays and assumed that covered everyone. The chaos! Calls scheduled on Diwali for our Indian team, on Lunar New Year for the folks in China. It was a masterclass in how not to do things. This Venezuelan holiday quest felt a bit like that – a small thing that ballooned because nobody had a clean, definitive answer readily available.
Eventually, I cobbled together something that looked reasonably accurate. I used a mix of a couple of more reputable-looking tourism sites, a Wikipedia cross-check (yeah, I know, but desperate times), and then I actually called Maria’s cousin who still lives in Valencia. Even he was a bit like, “Eh, mostly these, but sometimes the government declares an extra day off for… reasons.” Super helpful.
So, yeah, that was my adventure in trying to pin down the list. It wasn’t just a quick lookup. It was a dive into the slightly murky waters of readily available public information, or the lack thereof. Makes you appreciate when things are straightforward, doesn’t it? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to explain to Maria why her “Carnival Super Sale” promo might need some date flexibility. Wish me luck.
