Is your favorite cultural or religious holiday gone from Google Calendar? Here’s a hack | Opinion
Have you noticed Google has dropped certain religious holidays and cultural events from the calendar app?
Even though I have an iPhone, I use Google calendars pretty extensively both for work and for home life planning. Maybe you do, too. So when I went to check what day Ash Wednesday was (by the way, it’s today), I realized I had to actually look it up in the tech giant’s powerhouse search engine to find it because it’s not in the calendar.
Same with Ramadan, which began on Feb. 28 and ends March 29. Of course, I knew when Black History Month began: Feb. 1. But when I searched for it, there was no mention. Gone. Hispanic Heritage Month on Sept. 15? Gone. No Pride Month.
I’m not the only one who noticed these absences. Tech news online magazine The Verge reported on it, followed by The Guardian and others.
There’s a way you can refill your calendar with many if not all of these holidays, and I’ll tell you how to do that in a moment. But first, why?
When I did my own research, I was puzzled. The major Christian holidays of Easter and Christmas remained, but not Good Friday or Ash Wednesday. All the Muslim holidays appeared to be erased, along with, even more surprising to me, the Jewish Holidays, except for Passover. No Hanukkah, no Yom Kippur or Purim.
The cultural holidays I mentioned earlier no longer appear in your automatic view. I was surprised and disappointed with no prominent announcement from Google. This might be a small inconvenience to some of you, but Google Calendar is used by hundreds of millions of people.
I immediately wondered, who was to blame? Was this because of President Donald Trump’s fight targeting government program on diversity, equity and inclusivity? Or is that just a social media conspiracy theory?
Calendar changes related to DEI?
What we do know is that Google announced that it would be rolling back its commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in its employment policies following with the president’s executive order.
Google also changed for users in the U.S. the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and changed the Alaskan mountain Denali to Mount McKinley after executive orders from Trump signed during his first day in office.
But did that apply to the calendar changes? No, says Google.
On its blog, Google announced that the company began to manually include these dates several years back but decided that was too much work.
“We got feedback that many other events and countries were missing, and it just wasn’t feasible to put hundreds of moments in everyone’s calendars — so in mid-2024 we made the decision to simplify and show only public holidays and national observances from timeanddate.com.”
That may be, but if you are like me, I’m just noticing it now. I could have sworn I looked up Hispanic Heritage Month last September for a story I edited. No matter. It’s gone now.
Impacting cultural awareness
What do Kansas Citians think about this, and more important, does this change impact cultural awareness in our city? Some users think so.
“It is a planned erasure of people of color in this country,” said Edgar Palacios, CEO of Latinx Education Collaborative. Palacios, who emphasized that he was speaking as a Kansas City resident, questions the goal behind the change.
“If the strategy is erasure, to say this is too much work, this is too much effort to highlight and to recognize people that exist. … I just don’t understand the idea behind not elevating identities and cultures that exist within the country that are very much part of the fabric of the country. What’s the point, right? Is it to diminish those people? Is it to pretend like they don’t exist? Is it to overlook the problems that exist within certain communities? Is it to ignore inequities, what is the goal?”
Neta Meltzer, Interim Executive Director of the Jewish Community Relations Bureau | AJC in Kansas City said Google’s decision is “disappointing to see a resource with such broad reach be made unavailable.”
She said for decades, JCRB|AJC has shared its calendar of Jewish holidays with school and community partners. “These calendars come packaged with an explanation of the holidays to provide a deeper understanding of our community and observances. We know how important it is for each of us to be aware of and sensitive to the observances of our friends and neighbors, and have seen firsthand how this awareness can open doors and serve as an entry point for understanding a community.”
Carmaletta M Williams, CEO of the Black Archives of Mid-America in Kansas City, said she has hope. She believes Google’s calendar change wouldn’t make ethnicity disappear by eliminating any references to these identities.
“The people who live the experience, honor the experience and support those who do will never let their being become invisible.”
How to get the dates back on your calendar
It’s a fairly easy fix to unhide some of these individual holidays from your calendar. From Google Help:
On your computer, open Google Calendar.
At the top right, click Settings and then Settings.
On the left panel, click Add calendar and then Browse calendars of interest.
Next to your preferred holiday calendar, click Expand Down arrow.
Select specific holidays and observances you want to show on your calendar.
This will bring back a lot of religious observances, but does not include the cultural ones. At this point, I don’t see how to get back Black History Month, International Women’s Day (this Saturday), Pride Month (June 1), Indigenous Peoples’ Day (Oct. 13), Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15) or others. If you identify a fix, let me know.
This story was originally published March 5, 2025 at 5:06 AM.
