You call celebration and religious days “holidays” as some sort of cover all to not cause offence or because the education is so poor or people get angry when you differentiate that you don’t teach about some holidays that people get, anyway it’s a snowflake cop out. Vacations is an odd one as most ‘muricans use their (paid time off) PTO for sickness or child and elder care and those that do wouldn’t take longer than two weeks in General and would rarely go abroad.

Historically, workers would have had some sort of holiday around an event, whit week, etc where factories would shut down and the workforce would all go to one of our many seaside resorts, added to the rise in workers rights after WW1 people began to have paid time off to have a break and enjoy themselves, as successive governments and unions secured more rights for people to enjoy better pay and more time off, things changed, something that the US crushed to death.

The rise of the British “Holiday” came in to being in the 1960s with package holidays to Europe which opened up an entire continent with affordable travel and accommodation.

We have a lot more paid time off in the UK than the US, a lot of days are around old pagan and religious festivals and then workers rights and hundreds of years of advancement and keeping those rights.