Goodbye to Sundays past

Tut, tut, tut, I can hear my Polish readers say. No Pole would confuse the Sabbath for Sunday, since the word for Saturday in Polish is derived from the word for the Sabbath. Only us foolish Anglo-Saxons who still celebrate pagan gods in the names of our weekdays would make such a blunder. But indeed, many of us do and we seem to believe that it is Sunday that God commanded us to keep holy. In the US, there is clearly much less confusion, because for them the new week does not start on Monday (the day on which us Anglo-Saxon pagans should be prostrating ourselves in honour of the moon), but on the previous day. Since their fairly large Jewish population has, over a period far longer than 2.000 years, mastered the art of keeping count, they know that the seventh day is never going to suddenly become the sixth.

I don’t wish to cause offence, so for the record I should state that although I was brought up as a Catholic, all faith has deserted me and I now consider myself an atheist. For people more religious than myself, the strictures against working on the Sabbath may indeed be reason enough to ban all trading on a Sunday, and even I have no objection to the insistence of at least one work-free day a week, as there was once a time when I worked a little every day. At that time, I wasn’t doing that many hours of work per week, but the effect of having no break at all was that I felt absolutely mentally exhausted.

The current laws against Sunday trading were lobbied for by the Solidarność trade union with the specific intent of protecting workers – so maybe there was no religious reasoning behind them. Moreover, I was rudely reminded that banning Sunday trading bans are nothing unusual when I went to visit my brother, who has taken up residence in Frankfurt. Believe it or not, the Germans don’t open their shops on Sundays! And this is in a country where only around 43 pct of all people identify as Christian. (It should be borne in mind that this and all the following statistics from that fount of all knowledge Wikipedia need to be taken with a pinch of salt, given that people often say they’re Christian without actively practising the faith or even believing in it very much.) But what about other countries in the EU? Austria (57 pct Christian) and Hungary (42.5 pct Christian) are no different, while Italy (pretty religious, with a 68 pct Christian population) shuts up shop too. In Spain (52 pct Christian), Sunday shopping is also a no-no, along with Norway (68 pct Christian), Switzerland (61 pct Christian), Slovenia (78 pct Christian) and Belgium (63 pct Christian). The only other EU country to prohibit Sunday shopping that I could find was Greece with a Christian population of 98 pct.

However, the question arises as to whether being Christian correlates with a rejection of Mammon on Sundays. Well, the top ten religious countries in Europe come in this order: Malta, Romania, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Croatia and Slovakia. Maybe there is a correlation, but then again, maybe there isn’t. I can’t see it myself, but I know that the data I have is too insufficient to go on and I’m no statistician. I know I should mention the UK. because that’s where I come from. But to be honest, I don’t really know what the situation is there. When I was a child, there definitely was a trading ban, but my childhood now goes so far back into the mists of time that some of you reading this weren’t even born, since I’ve now been in Poland for a long, long time. According to Wikipedia, it’s a complicated situation in the UK, as shops there are generally allowed to open with some restrictions (but this doesn’t apply in Scotland).

Anyway, back here in Poland, despite stores now being allowed to operate on Sundays, the ban is still theoretically (at the time of writing) in place. According to Rzeczpospolita’s website, a decision has already been made to lift the ban, as the retail sector has long been lobbying for. To protect workers, the government is proposing that all those employed in retail must be given at least two free days a week. But now, strangely enough, having lived through six years of not being able to go shopping on Sundays, I’m no longer so vehemently opposed to the ban. It might have been an inconvenience, but I suppose I’ve just got used to it.