Look up public holidays for any country and year with zero API keys — the Nager.Date API via curl, with long-weekend detection and cross-country planning. Use when asked what are the holidays in a country, is date X a holiday somewhere, find long weekends this year, or which days is the team in Japan and Germany both off. Produces the holiday list with local names, the specific-date answer, long-weekend candidates, and the rerunnable command.
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Use public-holidays to check whether [date] is a public holiday in [country] for [year], with its local name, regional applicability, holiday type, and a rerunnable source command.
Required inputs
[date]
[country]
[year]
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SKILL.md
name: public-holidaysdescription: "Look up public holidays for any country and year with zero API keys — the Nager.Date API via curl, with long-weekend detection and cross-country planning. Use when asked what are the holidays in a country, is date X a holiday somewhere, find long weekends this year, or which days is the team in Japan and Germany both off. Produces the holiday list with local names, the specific-date answer, long-weekend candidates, and the rerunnable command."
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
Example Trigger Phrases
"What are the holidays in a country?"
"Find long weekends this year."
"Which days is the team in Japan and Germany both off?"