Showing holidays in a schedule and/or copying tasks
 

I know that I can remove days from my schedule (Like holidays) so they will be "skipped" by defining the allowed scheduled for the task, but I like to have some "line item" in my schedules that shows the holidays - so it's obvious why something that should be scheduled Monday through Friday is instead scheduled from Monday to Monday in some weeks (because Friday is a holiday, for example).

Is there a way to have the software "skip" days but still show some indication explicitly in the schedule that those days are "blocked out"?

Alternatively, I don't always want to totally block all activities on those days - only some activities - so simply having some indication on the graphical schedule that these are "special days" would be nice. (Like there is a pink bar showing the current day - I'd like a bar of some color shading in all of these "special" days that I would define.) I might be able to accommodate something like this using resources (assign some of my tasks to resources who work on these days and other tasks to resources who do not work these days), but I haven't tried using the resources yet.

The alternative I've been using is to explicitly define a "task" that represents each holiday. I keep all of these in one "unit" of the schedule (sub-items within one "Holidays" outline item. Then when I'm scheduling a task that will include one of those holidays, I copy that holiday item out of the "holiday" outline section and paste it into the part of the schedule where I want it to show up. That works OK for holidays for which the dates are put in by hand, but some of my "holidays" are really "every other Friday off." Since I compute those dates in my "holidays" part of the outline, when I try to copy and paste those tasks into other parts of the schedule, the copies maintain the connection to the original computation. In some ways that is good, but I don't want all of those dependency lines to show up in the main part of the schedule - I effectively want a reference to a task in one part of my schedule without seeing those lines that reflect dependencies in the graphical schedule.

Any suggestions on a better way to do this?

Julia