The club says it meets every Tuesday. That is true enough to print, and this page is the asterisk.
Which Tuesdays the club skips
The two long public holidays, and very little else. Every Spring Festival Tuesday on record has been a week off, and every Golden Week but one. The one-day festivals go the other way: the club has met on or just before Halloween and Christmas in every year the record covers, and at Christmas often with a party.
The three that depend on the year have their reasons. Every time Valentine’s Day went without a meeting, Spring Festival was within a week of it. Mid-Autumn was missed twice when it ran into Golden Week, and once in 2024, when the festival fell on the Tuesday itself in the week of the anniversary party. Labour Day only takes a Tuesday in some years; of the three on record, the club met once.
Every Tuesday since 2014
Each row is a year and each square a Tuesday, in the same column every year, so a habit shows up as a column. The hollow stripe at the start of October is Golden Week. The hollow squares that wander between late January and February are Spring Festival, moving with the lunar calendar.
Before 2020 some meeting dates are worked out from the WeChat posts that announced them. A week off between two such dates is drawn with a dashed outline; a longer gap between them is left as no record.
When the holiday becomes the theme
The weeks the club does meet over a holiday, it often makes the holiday the evening’s subject: a red dress code at Christmas 2016, roses and cake on Valentine’s Day 2017, a gift exchange outdoors on Christmas Eve 2024, and two first-meetings-back after Spring Festival built around home and red envelopes.
Golden Week
In the charts above, the Golden Weeks of 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2019 are drawn dashed: the meeting numbers skip that week, but the dates either side are worked out from WeChat posts. The list further down leaves them out, because it only counts breaks where both dates are on record.
The one National Day the record shows the club meeting through is 2020. #748 was a reverse meeting: the results were announced first and the evaluations given before anyone had spoken.
In 2026 the club is off again on 6 October and back on 13 October.
Every break, one by one
The meetings are numbered. If #814 is 25 January and #815 is 8 February, then nothing happened in between and the club took the week off. If the numbers jump, the meetings happened and the paperwork did not survive.
Only the first kind counts here, and only where both dates are recorded rather than inferred. That leaves eighteen occasions since 2014.
What the club said at the time
Only twice does a surviving post actually announce a break. Both are Chinese New Year, seven years apart, and the difference in tone is the whole point:
鉴于春节放假，Shenzhen Toastmasters Club 2 月 17 号和 24 号的的例会暂停举行， 春节后第一次会议将在 3 月 3 号如期举行。
That is February 2015. Two weeks off, one typo, no adjectives.
春节期间，希望大家珍惜陪伴家人的时光，也让自己好好休整，蓄力迎接来年的挑战， 我们休会一周，2022.2.8 会议不见不散～
That is January 2022. Same instruction, but now with a reason: spend the time with your family, rest properly, come back with something in the tank.
The long ones
Two of the breaks are longer than a holiday and nothing in the archive explains them: seven weeks in spring 2021, and three more a few weeks later. The club was still numbering its meetings across both of them, so it fully intended to come back, and it did.
Before it was weekly
Between 2008 and 2013 there are ten more gaps of a fortnight, and none of them is a break. The club met twice a month then. The first website says so, and the meeting numbers agree: a fortnight was the schedule. Somewhere around 2013 it became every week and stayed that way.
Which makes the real headline of this page a different one. In the twelve years since, out of roughly six hundred Tuesdays, the club has taken about eighteen of them off.