I really doubt that farmers in the 1800s or even early 1900s just picked up and took off for two weeks to go lay on the beach. They worked 365 days a year and were fine.

I really doubt farmers have ever "worked 365 days a year" in the way you are thinking of.

Vacation, as we think of it, may be a "relatively new thing historically" (after all the 19th century sources cited by other responses are not that old, relatively speaking).

But is the rise of "vacations" as a concept likely related to the rise of wage labor and the division of labor?

Yes, ye olden farmer probably did not jet off to the beach.

But wouldn't they have had relatively idle times of year, regular holidays, and an overall less structured work life (which was integrated with their family lives, thus obviating one of the purposes of modern vacations, i.e. "quality time" with your family)?

Hopefully someone more expert than I can chime in, because I think these are all extremely relevant issues of context required to flesh out your premise.

Edit: And these questions of context ignore the fact that going from "vacation is a modern concept" to "humans evolved not to take vacations" and thus it is totally unnecessary to our well being is an enormous leap.

Many middle-class people took vacations prior to 1900. In fact, I've recently read an interesting book examining how the practice of 19th century tourism helped to cement an idea of "nation" and "national identity" in English Canadian culture. In it, Cecilia Morgan argues that trans-Atlantic tourism in the 1870s resulted in the formulation of distinctive notions of Canadian-ness that distinguished travelers from both Americans and British. [1] She also describes that this tourism would look like; early on, travelers would travel by ship from North America to port cities in Europe. There, they could travel by train or coach to their destinations - or another ship if traveling to the continent from Britain. She even includes sections on different European countries, how travelers perceived these places, and how race and ethnicity played into presumed relationships while "on the road."

Similarly, the Canadian historian Ian McKay writes extensively about 19th century tourism to the Annapolis Valley in Nova Scotia, Canada in his book In the Province of History. Again, middle-class tourists took their vacations from across Canada and the United States to come to Nova Scotia and experience "the province primeval." They consumed folk-culture, sought after the setting of Woodsworth's famous poem "Evangeline," and explored the storied environment of the "Grand Dérangement" of the Acadiens. You can even see this in the marketing of Canadian railway companies, check out the logo for the Dominion Atlantic Railway, for example. The "Land of Evangeline" was not simply marketed that way as a gimmick, but to attract tourists to the region through the railway service. [2]

[1] Cecilia Morgan, ‘A Happy Holiday’: English Canadians and Trans-Atlantic Tourism, 1870-1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

[2] Ian McKay, In the Province of History: The Making of the Public Past in 20th Century Nova Scotia, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010.

I'm not a sociologist, so I'm not going to comment on whether humans are inherently structured towards 'taking time off'. But middle-class people were already taking vacations in 18th century England - a century which saw a growth in the idea of taking holidays as well as the creation of resort towns (a concept around which Bath grew to prominence, for example) - check out Klein's "Politeness and the Interpretation of the Eighteenth Century", for example.

Something that I don't think you've considered, however, is how possible it really was for anyone to take a vacation when travel was so difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. In 1700, it took something to the tune of 10 days to travel by land from London to York - a timespan reduced only by the coming of steam-powered transport (and, to a lesser extent, by infrastructural improvements contemporaneously).

Moreover, the incidence of saints' days and other festivals does rather put paid to your idea of non-stop working. Just because people didn't vacation in terms of travelling certainly doesn't mean that they worked 365 days a year; apart from mandated days of rest (the observation of which obviously varied) there were also holidays, some of which persist today (May Day, for example); others, like Whitsun, tend not to be celebrated any more.

So I'd argue that your conception of a vacation meaning "taking two weeks off to go lay on the beach" is inherently flawed; to give an answer firmly rooted in the western Christian world (as, I admit, this is the extent of my knowledge in this regard), taking time away from work for a variety of purposes has characterised human activity; advances in transport and the various leisure industries has meant that such time away from work can be partaken in the modern sense of holidaying, a concept which was not realistically possible in what was previously a much more localised world.

I've argued that the idea of working less and taking off time from work is something that is really new just in the past few hundred years.

Well, this is your conception of the past. There are some obvious problems with your approach to this topic, which the other respondents have outlined, but I'll focus on the question as you have laid it out and offer a more left-field suggestion.

I really doubt that farmers in the 1800s or even early 1900s just picked up and took off for two weeks to go lay on the beach.

Well this is what some people do today, others go on sight-seeing tours, or climb mountains. Some people go on pilgrimages to Mecca, Rome, etc. or visit Anfield, Old Trafford, etc. (whether these are sacral by nature or sacralisation of the secular). You might not see pilgrimage as a vacation (although these could be substantial periods away from the 'office') and I am making no comment on whether modern pilgrimages or the medieval Christian version are/were labours of love which equate to work or pleasure. The point is that individuals from almost every socio-economic section of medieval society (possibly barring slaves - but I can't comment fully on that) was capable of taking the time off to go on pilgrimage should they so wish. Whether this is visiting Rome, Jerusalem, or Canterbury.

There were inhibitors on the potential success of a pilgrimage but these were but they were not in any form restricted to the economic, political, or social elite of medieval Europe.

Am I completely off my rocker here?

Probably not, but that doesn't mean the evidence supports your assumptions and beliefs either!

Mark Twain wrote his famous autobiographical The Innocents Abroad after traveling in 1867 on an "all-included" vacation cruise around the Mediterranean aboard a retired US naval vessel. Here's the advertisement for the cruise, billing the "Holy Land" prominently.

Twain presented it as a somewhat new thing at least in scale. Some ports wanted to keep the ship in quarantine until long after they'd planned to depart. When they docked at Sevestapol, "the Emperor of Russia" wished to receive them, implicitly for the sheer novelty value of seeing "a handful of private citizens of America, traveling simply for recreation."

It depends entirely on how you define the term 'vacation'.

If you mean solid chunks of leisure time, not working, quality time spent with families and friends, then vacations are incredibly old.

It is tourism, especially at significant distances, that is an invention of the post-industrial world. This largely has to do with vast improvements to transportation, drastically reducing both travel time and overall cost, making vacations to far off locales significantly more accessible to the middle/working class.

Vacations- going on "tour" as some would say- isn't a new thing, it's just a feature of the middle and upper classes. The issue is more that 500 years ago you might visit your cousins the next town over as opposed to hopping on a plane for 10 hours and ending up in Tokyo.

Most study has found that humans today work more than they ever have- modern anthropologists have found that most nomadic / semi-nomadic groups in the world today work a ~20 hour work week during your typical season, but the question is always going to be what's working and what's merely, "working." You might work 40 hours a week but you're not necessarily actually doing anything over those 40 hours. There's plenty of anecdotes from Native Americans who, when the Europeans showed up, thought we were all mad because of how often we'd be working at something.

You can thank the Puritans for the 40 hour work week. Or maybe it was the Calvinists who came up with it.... Church history was a long time ago. No pun intended. The entire concept came from the idea that if people were busy with labor and work they'd have no time for impure thoughts and evil ideas.