Fun
World Jigsaw Puzzle Day
In 1766, a London engraver and mapmaker named John Spilsbury glued a printed map of the world onto a thin sheet of hardwood, took a fine marquetry …
Topic
Fun
The gloriously silly side of the calendar — the playful, quirky days that exist purely to raise a smile.
28 articles
Fun
World Origami Day
Lillian Oppenheimer was in her fifties, recently returned from a decade abroad, when she walked into a New York toy shop in 1958 looking for a book on …
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World Rock Paper Scissors Day
In the spring of 2005, Takashi Hashiyama, president of the Japanese electronics firm Maspro Denkoh Corporation, could not decide which of the …
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World Juggling Day
On the wall of Tomb 15 at Beni Hasan, a limestone cliff cemetery on the east bank of the Nile roughly 250 kilometres south of Cairo, a painter working …
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World Smile Day
In 1963, a freelance commercial artist in Worcester, Massachusetts, named Harvey Ball spent roughly ten minutes drawing a yellow circle with two dots …
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World Quantum Day
The fourteenth of April was chosen for a joke that only physicists would get. Written as 4.14, the date echoes the number 4.14, which is the rounded …
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World Emoji Day
Look closely at the calendar emoji on an iPhone — 📅 — and you will find it permanently set to 17 July. That is not a default that means nothing. When …
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World Chess Day
On 20 July 1924, while Paris was hosting the Summer Olympic Games, delegates from fifteen national federations gathered in the city and signed the …
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US National Happy Hour Day
Around 1913, a group of bored sailors aboard the US Navy battleship USS Arkansas formed a club they called the Happy Hour Social, and began staging …
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National Ugly Sweater Day
In December 2002, two friends in Vancouver named Chris Boyd and Jordan Birch threw a party at the Coquitlam home of a friend, Scott Lindsay, and gave …
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National Selfie Day
On 13 September 2002, a young man posted to an Australian online forum a photograph of a split lip he had sustained at a friend’s twenty-first …
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National Picnic Day
The word “picnic” first surfaces in print in 1649, in an anonymous French broadside of burlesque verse with the gleeful title Les Charmans …
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National Hug Day
In 1986, a young University of Michigan psychology graduate named Kevin Zaborney looked at the calendar and noticed a melancholy gap. The lights of …
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National Best Friends Day
Think of the person you would call first with good news, before family, before a partner, before anyone official is told. Think, too, of the one who …
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Leap Day
On Thursday 4 October 1582, the people living in Rome, Madrid and Lisbon went to bed and woke up the next morning to find it was Friday 15 October. …
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Lazy Moms Day
Somewhere in the early 2010s, in the comment threads of parenting blogs and the corners of social media where exhausted mothers gathered after the …
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Lazy Day
The Roman elite had a word for it that no English term quite captures: otium. Not idleness, exactly, and not holiday either, but a deliberate …
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International Talk Like a Pirate Day
On 6 June 1995, two friends in Albany, Oregon, were playing racquetball badly. One of them, John Baur or Mark Summers, the accounts agree it was one …
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International Joke Day
Around 1900 BC, a Sumerian scribe pressed into clay what is now reckoned to be the oldest recorded joke in the world. It is a piece of toilet humour …
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Hug Day
The night before Valentine’s Day, much of India and a good slice of the rest of the world stops to do one specific thing: hug. The 13th of …
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Hug a Vegetarian Day
PETA is rarely accused of subtlety. The animal-rights group made its name with billboards, fake blood and stunts engineered to provoke, so it is a …
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Groundhog Day
On the morning of 2 February 1887, a small party of men in heavy coats trudged up a wooded rise outside the Pennsylvania town of Punxsutawney, peered …
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Galentine's Day
On 11 February 2010, NBC broadcast the sixteenth episode of the second season of Parks and Recreation, in which the relentlessly earnest civil servant …
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Fun at Work Day
In 1996, a former university lecturer named Matt Weinstein, who ran a California company called Playfair, decided the working world needed a …
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Fruitcake Toss Day
Sometime in the mid-1990s, a handful of residents of Manitou Springs, Colorado, were nursing drinks at a bar called the Ancient Mariner and …
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Fibonacci Day
Write out the twenty-third of November the American way and you get 11/23, which is the opening of one of the most recognisable number sequences in …
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Day of the Ninja
In 2003 a website called Ninja Burger was selling a joke. It claimed, with mock seriousness, to deliver fast food anywhere in the world via a fleet of …
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April Fools' Day
On the evening of 1 April 1957, around eight million Britons watched the respected BBC current-affairs programme “Panorama” report on a …