Google Calendar: Add Country Holidays

Google Calendar with holidays of your country; is this something you are not quite familiar? Does colleagues from other countries schedule meetings on holidays of your country? If it is, no one else is there to blame (other than you); they are not aware of those holidays unless otherwise you notify them. The simplest way is to mark those days as holidays in your calendar, but it is not practical to add all of those manually. 

Importing Holiday Calendars

You are not required to add each of those manually. With few clicks, you can import the holiday calendars of your country into your Calendar. Out of the box, Google supports a number of country holiday calendars; 41 countries as of today, hopefully it will grow further.



You must open your Google calendar from a browser, and click on the
'Other calendars' - > 'Browse Interesting Calendars' on left panel as shown above.

This shows a page with holidays of each country, and you can subscribe to any number of those as per your interest. After you subscribe, those will be shown in your calendar. If you are working with colleagues in multiple countries, I suggest you to subscribe to their country calendars so that you will no longer be scheduling meetings on their holidays as well.

My County is not there in Holiday Calendars

If your country is not found in holiday calendars, we need to use an alternative approach. As you can see from the above screen, there is another item named 'Import Calendar'. When you click on that, Google Calendar allows you to upload iCalender or CSV file which has events. You will have to search the internet and find such an event file with holidays and upload.

2013 Sri Lankan Holiday Calendar

You can find the 2013 - Sri Lankan holiday Calendar here, click on the 'Download' link on top of that page and save the calendar2013sl.ics.txt file on to your disk, then import using the above popup window. It will add 26 events into your calendar, and following is how you will see the holidays.

As Google Calendar has become the defacto standard of meeting schedules in many organizations, my belief is that it is the right time for you to spend 2-3 minutes to import holiday calendars into yours (if you have not done it yet). The advantage is obvious, meeting organizers always notice if you are not available.