USA Holidays

Lauren,

...tell me in simple layman's terms how to add USA holidays into my ICAL.

Welcome to Apple Discussions.

Open iCal, then choose Calendar>Subscribe, and paste webcal://ical.mac.com/ical/US32Holidays.ics into the "Calendar URL:" window. Then click on (Subscribe).


;~)

Hi Lauren,

Were you able to get the holiday subscription to work?
Adding holidays creates a new calendar, so you can just turn the holidays on/off by checking/unchecking the box next to the US Holidays calendar.

David

Hi,

Correction. Adding the US Holidays doesn't add a new calendar, it adds a subscription to an existing calendar. You won't be able to change the holidays for instance.

Hope you get it to work.

David

Related question:

Can't a person open a calendar that he/she is subscribed to, do some sort of "select all" to select all the events in that calendar, then switch to one of their own calendars (or even create a new one), then paste all the events from the subscribed calendar into their own? Then they could move forward from there?

Thanks,
John

Lauren:
At first, I too was a bit disappointed with the holiday and event options in iCal. The help wasn't too 'helpful', in layman's terms anyway. But then I turned to the great community Mac people.

Turn's out that iCal so elegantly flexible & powerful that sometimes we are looking for something to be harder that it is. The subscription feature is the key. With the subscription you can link to other calendars and have them auto update. These can be from other people or your own calendars. It looks like ical.mac.com ... potentially has a calendars to subscribe to. But that requires a .Mac account...

But in the age of the internet there should be lots of other options. So I googled and discovered Google Calendar and their supportive community. They support the iCal, and other, formats. (See link at end) Here you can search for a wide variety of calendars. I found a US holiday and Christian calendar. I'm confident that other sites are out there.

Here's what I did. After finding a calendar you like, you can either:
A) Subscribe by control-click on the iCal link, "copy link" and paste into the iCal subscribe dialog. This will get you the Auto updates but no changes allowed.

B) Download and import by control-click and "save the linked file" to your local computer. Then just drag the iCal file onto your iCal window and you'll be prompted with options for importing the calendar.

This is all so very cool. We really can't blame Apple too much, think of all the complexities and varieties of calendars around the world, it's better that they've enabled an open format and easy to use tools for thinking people to use.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Apple today, I used to some 20 years ago as in intern. Today, for work, I'm chained to a Windows OS due to a narrow-mined IS department. However I not spending my own money with Bill and friends.

Good luck with your calendars.

Goodle Calendar: Holiday page: http://www.google.com/calendar/render#

What in the???

I thought the same thing, that any respectable Calendar would have the ability to insert or add Holidays for where you are at. So I looked through the prefs, and then in Help. Found this in iCal help under "How to import iCal calendars from Microsoft Entourage";

"iCal does not import Entourage's holidays, because holiday files are already included with iCal."

Ok, where are those holiday files? What if I were just a simple user, was told that Mac does it all, where would I find, in the iCal application, or the Mac help, where those included holiday files are? Subscribing isn't included. What if you don't have internet when you need to add them or know? Every other, and I do mean every other calendar application I have ever used, included the ability to add holidays with a few clicks. So if anyone can tell me where the 'included' files are, I would be happy.

iCal Help is mistaken about holiday files being "included" with iCal. (I know that's what it says, but they're not.)

Subscribing to one of the myriad resources on the web is the most practicable way to do what you want. You do not need to be online to view the holiday calendar, merely to make the initial subscription. (In other words, once you subscribe the holiday remains available even when you go offline.)

I'm trying to Subscribe to the Google Calender by going to the link provided above. I get to the Google calendar and Search Public Calendars and find the USA Holidays and Christian Holiday and they add to my Google Calendar but I can't find their URL to copy and past to my iCal Subscribe. Can you help me with that? Thanks!

Go to manage calendars ( at the foot of the calendar list in Google Calendar.

Click on the calendar that you want to subscribe to in iCal.

You'll see the calendar details appear with a line for "calendar address"

There's an iCal button in there which you can click on. This will subscribe to that calendar.

The American Holiday one is at: http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/usa__en%40holiday.calendar.google.com/public /basic.ics

the Christian one I don't know about.

Great! I added both the American Holidays and the Christian one. Now I want to delete the Christian Holidays. How do I do that? Thanks again!

Do you know how I can delete a calendar I added from Google Calendar? I was told to find the Calendar and delete it. However, the calendar doesn't show up anywhere on my iCal, other than all the dates it's loaded onto my calender. I've deleted a lot of them one at a time but double clicking and canceling, but the Christian calendar, the one I want to delete, added dozens! And on Easter it added at least 20 events and sent invitations. I don't know what's going on, but I need to delete it. I hope you can help. Thanks. Gina

Am I correct that before you can get to the iCal link and the addresses you have to firs subscribe to the calendar in Google so it shows up on you google calendars page?

Thank you so much. This post was very clear, concise and helpful. Got my holidays on my iCal now.
Thanks!