Feds petition to get Christmas Eve off

Update: Obama on Friday, Dec. 21, issued an executive order declaring Christmas Eve 2012 a federal holiday. See our story here. 

Rather than waiting to see if President Obama is in the Christmas spirit, federal employees have attempted to take the cause of getting an extra day off around the holidays into their own hands.

The online petition, created on the White House’s "We the People" platform, urges President Obama to issue an executive order to give the federal workforce a day off on Dec. 24 in addition to the Christmas holiday.

As of this publishing, the petition had just more than 2,000 signatures, well shy of the 25,000 needed to prompt an official response from the Obama administration.

“Federal employees have had a pay freeze for the past several years and the pay and benefits for the federal workforce have been under serious attack during the national elections held this year,” the author wrote in the petition. “Giving federal employees an extra holiday on December 24, 2012, would be a good gesture to improve morale of the federal workforce.”

Christmas falls on a Tuesday this year. The last two times that happened -- in 2001 and 2007 -- President George W. Bush gave federal employees Christmas Eve off, creating a four-day weekend.