There are many pros and cons to a Christmas day falling on a Monday. The first and most obvious benefit of a Monday Christmas is that it transforms the most dreaded day of the week into heaven, literally. Heaven on earth. Heaven, not just for believers in heaven and in Jesus and in God, but even to the most incorrigible and unrepentant non-believers. Which is why, this Christmas, there won’t be such a thing as “Monday blues”. But Christmas on a Monday comes with many more benefits –like giving us the luxury of a three-day weekend where we would have had only Saturday and Sunday. You know how in some years, Christmas cheats us by falling on a weekend? In fact, how many things do you know that are worse than X-mas on a Saturday or Sunday? I have abhorred these weekend Christmases right from the time I was a small schoolboy, although the situation only got more painful when I eventually arrived in the world of employment. With regards to this issue though, some slack must be cut for Rwanda and its unique and energizing model of pushing public holidays ahead when the said holidays happen to fall on a weekend. Who else does that? But Christmas on a Monday is also fraught with its own challenges. Personally, it was the hustle of having to go for Christmas mass when the previous day –Sunday was also church. The good news is that this was way back –when I still used to attend church (or rather, when I was still carted off to church) because such was the family church tradition. At home, church was mandatory and there was no debate about it. To be exempt from church, one had to be ill, not just sick. One had to be ill and bed ridden. A Monday Christmas is not a very good idea for people that love the bitter, because the party would have started so early –two days in advance. In this way, many people have slept through their Christmases, a stone mason pounding away in their heads as they battle the cumulative hangover from Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
