public-holidays

Public Holidays Skill

"Is Monday a holiday in Germany?" is a five-second question that decides deploy schedules, invoice due dates, and vacation math — and Nager.Date answers it for 100+ countries over keyless HTTPS. This skill fetches, answers the actual question (a date, a plan, a long weekend), and respects the two traps: regional holidays that don't apply nationwide, and the countries whose holiday culture the API's global flag quietly encodes.

What This Skill Produces

• The answer — is/isn't a holiday, the next one coming, or the year's list — whichever was asked
• Local names alongside English — 元日 reads differently than "New Year's Day," and the local name is what colleagues will say
• Long-weekend candidates — holidays adjacent to weekends, the planning gold
• The command — exact curl, rerunnable

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• Country (or countries) — ISO two-letter codes resolved from names; multi-country questions are batched, one call each
• Year — default the current year; "next 12 months" spans two calls
• The real question — a specific date, planning a trip, scheduling around a team, or hunting long weekends — the output shapes to it

Framework: The Calls and the Traps

1. The year list: curl -s "https://date.nager.at/api/v3/PublicHolidays/2026/JP" → JSON array with date, localName, name, global, counties, types. Next holidays: .../api/v3/NextPublicHolidays/DE. Specific-date check: fetch the year, match the date. Long weekends, precomputed: .../api/v3/LongWeekend/2026/DE — the API does the adjacency math itself.
2. The global flag is the regional trap: global: false + a counties array means the holiday applies only in listed regions (Bavaria's extra days, Scotland vs England). Answering "Germany has a holiday" for a Bavaria-only day is the classic wrong answer — quote the regions.
3. types matters at the edges: most entries are Public, but some countries include Bank, School, Optional, Observance — an Observance is not a day off; filter or label by type when the question is "is the office closed."
4. Cross-country scheduling: fetch each country, then intersect/union per the question ("when are BOTH teams off" vs "when is ANYONE off"); present as a small table with local names.
5. Coverage honesty: ~110 countries; religious holidays following lunar calendars are included where official but company/regional observances (Diwali bonus days, US company holidays like day-after-Thanksgiving) may not be — say when a workplace calendar could differ from the public list.

Output Format

Holidays: [country/countries, year]

[The direct answer to the actual question first.]

| Date | Holiday (local · English) | Scope |

|---|---|---|

[Filtered to the question — the date, the range, the intersection; regional entries labeled with their regions]

[Long-weekend section when planning was the intent]

Source: Nager.Date · rerun: [exact curl]

[Coverage caveat when workplace/regional nuance is in play]

Quality Checks

• [ ] The specific question is answered before any list appears
• [ ] Regional (global: false) holidays are labeled with their regions, never presented as national
• [ ] Non-public types are filtered or labeled when "day off" is the question
• [ ] Local names appear alongside English
• [ ] Multi-country answers show the intersection/union the question implied

Anti-Patterns

• [ ] Do not answer from memory — holiday rules change and lunar dates move; fetch or hand over the command
• [ ] Do not present a regional holiday as nationwide — the global flag exists to be read
• [ ] Do not count observances as days off
• [ ] Do not dump 15 holidays when the question was one date
• [ ] Do not promise a workplace is closed — public holidays and company calendars are cousins, not twins