While Sweden is not a religious country (I read somewhere that we are actually the number 1 atheist country in the world), we do have several religious holidays. One such holiday is the Ascension day, which is now on Thursday.
The Friday is actually not a holiday as such. However, since the Ascension day is always on a Thursday, we get the situation that we have one single lone work-day right before the weekend. For that reason it has become more or less common practice that we work a few minutes longer the other days, just so that we can take the Friday off as well.
God natt / god morgon. :)