Observance
Zero Discrimination Day
On 27 February 2014, in Beijing, the head of the UN’s AIDS agency stood up to launch a day that did not yet exist anywhere on a calendar. Michel …
Topic
Observance
A catch-all for the world’s many other notable days and observances worth marking.
346 articles
Observance
Youth Day
On 12 August 1998, in the final hours of a five-day meeting in Lisbon, ministers from dozens of governments agreed on something modest but lasting: a …
Observance
Yorkshire Day
In 1975, in the East Riding town of Beverley, members of a year-old pressure group gathered to make a point about lines on a map. The Local Government …
Observance
www day
In March 1989, a thirty-three-year-old British software engineer at CERN handed his manager a document titled, with almost comic modesty, …
Observance
World Youth Skills Day
On 18 December 2014, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution, put forward by Sri Lanka and co-sponsored by Portugal and more than a …
Observance
World Wood Day
In March 2013, woodcarvers, luthiers, foresters and sculptors gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for the first World Wood Day. The host was the …
Observance
World Vegetarian Day
On 3 October 1847, a few dozen reformers met at Northwood Villa, a hydropathic establishment in Ramsgate on the Kent coast, and founded the Vegetarian …
Observance
World Vegan Day
In November 1944, a woodworking teacher from Yorkshire named Donald Watson gathered six like-minded people in a London tea room and, dissatisfied that …
Observance
World UFO Day
In the first week of July 1947, a ranch foreman named William Brazel found a scatter of foil, rubber and balsa-wood sticks on grazing land near …
Observance
World Tourism Day
In 1971, at a meeting in Istanbul of the International Union of Official Travel Organisations, a Nigerian delegate named Ignatius Amaduwa Atigbi rose …
Observance
World Toilet Day
In 2001 a Singaporean businessman named Jack Sim, having made his fortune in construction and decided he had enough money, asked a question almost …
Observance
World Thinking Day
In 1926, at the fourth World Conference of the Girl Guide and Girl Scout movement, held at Camp Edith Macy in the wooded hills of New York state, the …
Observance
World Suicide Prevention Day
On 10 September 2003, in Stockholm, the International Association for Suicide Prevention launched the first World Suicide Prevention Day in …
Observance
World Statistics Day
On 20 October 2010, statistical offices in more than a hundred countries simultaneously celebrated something they rarely get to celebrate at all: …
Observance
World Standards Day
On 14 October 1946, delegates from twenty-five countries gathered in London and agreed to create an international body that would coordinate the way …
Observance
World Sparrow Day
In the city of Nashik, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, a young conservationist named Mohammed Dilawar noticed something that almost no one else …
Observance
World Sight Day
On 8 October 1998, Lions Clubs International marked the first World Sight Day, an outgrowth of its SightFirst campaign to combat preventable …
Observance
World Rabies Day
On 6 July 1885 a nine-year-old Alsatian boy named Joseph Meister, mauled fourteen times by a rabid dog, was brought to Louis Pasteur in Paris. …
Observance
World Prematurity Day
The date of World Prematurity Day was not chosen by committee or for symbolic neatness. It is 17 November because that is the birthday of the daughter …
Observance
World Post Day
On 9 October 1874, delegates from 22 nations gathered in the Swiss capital and signed the Treaty of Bern, creating the General Postal Union — the body …
Observance
World Population Day
On 11 July 1987 a baby was symbolically declared the world’s five-billionth person, and demographers used the occasion to put a single, vivid …
Observance
World Pneumonia Day
On 12 November 2009, more than a hundred organisations — child-health charities, vaccine alliances, research institutes and UN agencies — banded …
Observance
World Octopus Day
World Octopus Day has a refreshingly specific birthplace: an online forum. The observance grew out of The Octopus News Magazine Online, known as …
Observance
World Mosquito Day
On the evening of 20 August 1897, in a hot, fly-blown laboratory in Secunderabad in southern India, a British army surgeon named Ronald Ross dissected …
Observance
World Maritime Day
On 17 March 1958, after a decade of diplomatic stalling, a United Nations convention finally entered into force and brought into being the body first …
Observance
World Kindness Day
In March 1963, Seiji Kaya, then president of the University of Tokyo, gave a farewell address to his graduating students and left them with an unusual …
Observance
World Intellectual Property Day
On 26 April 1970, the Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization came into force, turning a Geneva clerical office that had …
Observance
World Hydrography Day
On 21 June 1921, representatives of nineteen maritime nations met in Monaco and founded the International Hydrographic Bureau, an organisation with a …
Observance
World Humanitarian Day
At about half past four in the afternoon on 19 August 2003, a flatbed truck packed with explosives detonated beneath the window of the United Nations …
Observance
World Hijab Day
When Nazma Khan arrived in New York from Bangladesh at the age of eleven, she was the only girl wearing a headscarf in her Bronx middle school. …
Observance
World Hemophilia Day
Frank Schnabel was born on 17 April 1942, lived with haemophilia A, and in 1963 founded the World Federation of Hemophilia (WFH) from Montreal because …
Observance
World Down Syndrome Day
The date is a piece of quiet wit. Written in the day-month form that most of the world uses, 21 March becomes 21/3 — the twenty-first day, the third …
Observance
World Development Information Day
On 19 December 1972, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 3038, establishing World Development Information Day and deciding it should …
Observance
World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought
In Paris on 17 June 1994, an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee adopted the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification — the only …
Observance
World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development
In November 2001, two months after the September 11 attacks, the member states of UNESCO meeting in Paris adopted the Universal Declaration on …
Observance
World Contraception Day
In 2007 a coalition of ten reproductive-health organisations agreed on a single, deliberately blunt mission statement: a world in which every …
Observance
World Cities Day
At the closing ceremony of Expo 2010 in Shanghai — a six-month world’s fair whose theme was “Better City, Better Life” and which …
Observance
Working naked day
The phrase comes from a book. Before it was a date on the internet’s sprawling calendar of unofficial holidays, “working naked” was …
Observance
Winnie the Pooh Day
Alan Alexander Milne was born in London on 18 January 1882, and it is his birthday, rather than any date drawn from the books, that anchors Winnie the …
Observance
WHO World No Tobacco Day
The date now fixed at 31 May was not the first one chosen. In 1987 the World Health Assembly passed resolution WHA40.38, which called for 7 April …
Observance
White shirt day
At eleven years after the event, in 1948, a former striker named Bert Christensen had an idea about a shirt. He had been one of the men who occupied …
Observance
White Day
In 1977, a reader wrote to a Japanese women’s magazine with a complaint that turned into a national custom: why, she asked, was …
Observance
Virus Appreciation Day
In 1898, working in the Netherlands on a disease that mottled tobacco leaves, the microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck found something that refused to …
Observance
VCR Day
On 14 April 1956, at a broadcasters’ convention in Chicago, the Californian engineering firm Ampex unveiled the VRX-1000, the first practical …
Observance
US World Bratwurst Day
In 1313 the Nuremberg city council passed an ordinance laying down exactly what could go into a bratwurst, insisting on pure muscle meat and banning …
Observance
US Wienerschnitzel Day
In 2007 the Austrian parliament did something that few governments bother to do for a single dish: it wrote one into law. An amendment to the …
Observance
US Trail Mix Day
In 1906 the American outdoorsman Horace Kephart, writing in his classic manual Camping and Woodcraft, recommended that a walker carry “a handful …
Observance
US Throw Out Your Leftovers Day
The date is not arbitrary. US Throw Out Your Leftovers Day falls on 29 November, and the choice is governed by a number from the United States …
Observance
US National Whipped Cream Day
In December 1947, a St Louis businessman named Aaron Lapin walked into the offices of America’s largest can manufacturers with an idea: whipped …
Observance
US National Welsh Rarebit Day
The earliest known appearance of the phrase “Welsh rabbit” dates to 1725, and from the very first it was a joke. There is no rabbit in the …
Observance
US National Vinegar Day
Around 5000 BCE, the Babylonians were already making vinegar from dates, figs and beer, using it to preserve food, to dress dishes and as a folk …
Observance
US National Vichyssoise Day
In 1917, the chef de cuisine of the Ritz-Carlton in New York set out to invent a cold soup that would startle his summer diners. Louis Diat reached …
Observance
US National Toasted Marshmallow Day
Around 2000 BC, on the marshy banks of the Nile, Egyptians dug up the root of a plant called Althaea officinalis, boiled out its sticky sap and mixed …
Observance
US National Tater Tot Day
In 1953, on the dry, irrigated farmland near Ontario, Oregon, two brothers stood over a heap of potato slivers and asked themselves a question that …
Observance
US National Tapioca Pudding Day
Run a spoon through a good tapioca pudding and you are stirring a dish whose key ingredient began as a starch pressed from a poisonous Amazonian root …
Observance
US National Tapioca Day
The word “cassava” most likely descends from the Tupi term caçábi, meaning “to squeeze” — a reference to the most important …
Observance
US National Taffy Day
In 1883 a heavy storm drove the sea over the Atlantic City boardwalk and flooded a young confectioner’s shop, soaking his stock of taffy in …
Observance
US National Sundae Day
On Sunday, 3 April 1892, a Unitarian minister named John M. Scott walked into Platt & Colt Pharmacy in Ithaca, New York, and was handed a dish of …
Observance
US National Stuffing Day
The oldest stuffing recipes we can read come from De Re Coquinaria, the Roman cookery collection attributed to Apicius and compiled around the late …
Observance
US National Steak Au Poivre Day
The historian-chefs who have tried to pin down who invented steak au poivre cannot agree, and the list of claimants reads like a roll-call of …
Observance
US National Spumoni Day
Spumoni was born in Naples at the close of the nineteenth century, in a city that already took its ice creams seriously, and its name tells you …
Observance
US National Spicy Guacamole Day
The Aztecs had a word for it long before anyone in the United States thought to give it a calendar date: āhuacamōlli, a compound of āhuacatl, avocado, …
Observance
US National Spareribs Day
By mid-afternoon on the Fourth of July, the smell has settled over half the back gardens in America: woodsmoke, rendering pork fat, the caramel edge …
Observance
US National Smore Day
In 1927, a Girl Scout handbook called Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts printed a campfire recipe under the plain heading “Some …
Observance
US National Shot Day
On 14 May 1796, in the Gloucestershire market town of Berkeley, a country doctor named Edward Jenner took fluid from a cowpox sore on the hand of a …
Observance
US National Scotch Day
In 1494, a clerk recording the royal accounts of Scotland noted that “eight bolls of malt” had been issued to Friar John Cor, a …
Observance
US National Sangria Day
The Real Academia Española, the body that guards the Spanish language, defines sangría as a refreshing drink of water, wine, sugar, lemon and other …
Observance
US National Salami Day
In 1436, the military leader Niccolò Piccinino reportedly ordered pigs raised specifically for salami-making in the hill town of Felino, near Parma in …
Observance
US National Rotisserie Chicken Day
Napoleon Bonaparte, by several accounts, could not get enough of spit-roasted fowl, and the kitchens of his Parisian palace kept chickens turning over …
Observance
US National Rocky Road Day
In March 1929, in a creamery on Grand Avenue in Oakland, California, William Dreyer reached for his wife’s sewing scissors. He used them to snip …
Observance
US National Punch Day
On 28 September 1632, a clerk of the British East India Company named Robert Addams, stationed on the Indian subcontinent, wrote a letter home in …
Observance
US National Prime Rib Day
There is a small linguistic trick hiding inside the most reassuringly expensive item on an American steakhouse menu. When a waiter announces the prime …
Observance
US National Pots De Creme Day
The small lidded cup is the first clue. Before a single spoonful of pot de crème is tasted, the vessel itself announces the dessert’s character: …
Observance
US National Pinot Noir Day
On 22 February 1965, a young Californian named David Lett pushed three thousand grafted vines into the soil of Oregon’s Willamette Valley, …
Observance
US National Piña colada Day
In 1954, a bartender named Ramón “Monchito” Marrero stood behind the bar of the Caribe Hilton in San Juan, Puerto Rico, charged with a …
Observance
US National Penuche Fudge Day
The most surprising thing about penuche is its name, which has nothing to do with New England, where the sweet is now most at home. It comes from the …
Observance
US National Pecan Torte Day
In 1832, a sixteen-year-old apprentice named Franz Sacher was left to improvise a dessert for Prince Klemens von Metternich’s guests in Vienna …
Observance
US National Parfait Day
In 1869 the French chef Jules Gouffé published Le Livre de Cuisine, and tucked among its recipes was a parfait au café: a coffee-scented frozen cream, …
Observance
US National Oatmeal Day
Oats began their career as a nuisance. For thousands of years they grew as a weed among the wheat and barley fields of the Near East and Europe, …
Observance
US National Nachos Day
One evening in 1943, a group of American army wives walked into the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, a Mexican town separated from Eagle Pass, Texas, …
Observance
US National Mousse Day
At a banquet in the early eighteenth century at the Palace of Versailles, a guest reaching for the mousse would not have found chocolate. They would …
Observance
US National Maple Syrup Day
Long before any European set foot in the north-eastern woodlands, the peoples of the region had already worked out one of the more improbable facts of …
Observance
US National Lollipop Day
In 1908, in New Haven, Connecticut, a candy maker named George Smith took a long look at a local confection: Reynolds Taffy, a chocolate caramel sold …
Observance
US National Linguine Day
In the writings of Giulio Giacchero, an economist and historian of Ligurian life, linguine appears in eighteenth-century Genoa as a festive dish: long …
Observance
Us national lager day
Around 1840, in a modest house in Philadelphia, a Bavarian immigrant named John Wagner brewed beer in an eight-gallon kettle for his friends and …
Observance
US National Kouign Amann Day
Around 1860, in the Breton fishing town of Douarnenez, a baker named Yves-René Scordia (1828–1878) reportedly ran short of dessert and short of flour, …
Observance
US National Indian Pudding Day
For 192 years, a single Boston restaurant kept a colonial dessert alive on its menu. Durgin-Park, opened near Faneuil Hall, served Indian pudding …
Observance
US National I Want Butterscotch Day
In 1817, a confectioner named Samuel Parkinson set up shop on the High Street of Doncaster, a market town in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and began …
Observance
US National Hot Sauce Day
In 1868, a ruined Maryland-born banker named Edmund McIlhenny planted his first commercial crop of small red peppers on Avery Island, a salt dome …
Observance
US National Hot Fudge Sundae Day
At a candy shop that Clarence Clifton Brown opened in downtown Los Angeles in 1906, a confectioner gently warmed a thick chocolate fudge, poured it …
Observance
US National Hot Cross Bun Day
In 1361, a monk named Brother Thomas Rocliffe, attached to the refectory at St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire, began baking small spiced cakes marked …
Observance
US National Hoagie Day
Southeast of central Philadelphia, on a marshy stretch of the Delaware River that locals called Hog Island after the pigs once left to forage there, …
Observance
US National Have A Bagel Day
In a set of Jewish community regulations written in Kraków in 1610, a particular ring of baked dough is named as a fitting gift to give a woman after …
Observance
US National Harvey Wallbanger Day
In 1969, an importer in San Francisco needed to sell more of a tall, golden, vanilla-scented Italian liqueur called Galliano, and so it more or less …
Observance
US National Guacamole Day
The choice of 16 September for US National Guacamole Day is no accident. It is the day Mexico marks the start of its War of Independence — the morning …
Observance
US National Grand Marnier Day
In 1880, in the village of Neauphle-le-Château west of Paris, a distiller named Louis-Alexandre Marnier-Lapostolle blended aged cognac with the …
Observance
US National Fudge Day
In 1886 a student in Baltimore paid forty cents a pound for a box of soft, chocolate-rich sweets unlike anything sold in the established …
Observance
US National Fritters Day
The Romans had a name for it: scriblita, a batter of flour and egg wrapped around vegetables, meat, or seafood and dropped into hot oil. It is one of …
Observance
US National Fried Chicken Day
The first widely accepted printed recipe for American fried chicken appears in The Virginia Housewife, a cookbook published in 1824 by Mary Randolph, …
Observance
US National French Toast Day
A Roman recipe collection compiled under the name of the gourmet Apicius, surviving in a text usually dated to the fourth or fifth century AD, …
Observance
US National French Fried Clam Day
On 3 July 1916, in the village of Essex, Massachusetts, a clam-shack owner named Lawrence “Chubby” Woodman took a teasing suggestion from …
Observance
US National Filet Mignon Day
In 1906, the American short-story writer O. Henry published a collection called The Four Million, and in one of its tales, “A Service of …
Observance
US National Espresso Day
In 1901, a Milanese manufacturer named Luigi Bezzera filed a patent for a machine that forced hot water and steam through finely ground coffee, …
Observance
US National Escargot Day
Around 49 BC, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder records, a man named Quintus Fulvius Lippinus laid out enclosures on his estate in the Tarquinii …
Observance
US National Eat Your Vegetables Day
Few sentences are as freighted with childhood memory as “eat your vegetables.” It is the standoff at the edge of the dinner plate, the …
Observance
US National Eat What You Want Day
In a farmhouse in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a husband-and-wife team named Thomas and Ruth Roy decided some years ago that the official calendar was …
Observance
US National Eat a Hoagie Day
In 1917, on a marshy spit of land along the Delaware River south-west of central Philadelphia, the United States government built what was then the …
Observance
US National Drive-Thru Day
In 1948, on a stretch of U.S. Route 66 in Springfield, Missouri, a former soldier with a business degree named Sheldon “Red” Chaney cut a …
Observance
US National Ding-a-Ling Day
In 1972, a man named Franky Hyle from Melrose Park, Illinois, placed a small advertisement in Chase’s Calendar of Annual Events, the …
Observance
US National Daiquiri Day
Around the time of the Spanish–American War of 1898, an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox was running iron operations near the village of …
Observance
US National Crown Roast of Pork Day
Stand a rack of pork ribs on end, curve it into a ring, tie the two ends together, and you have done something quietly clever: you have turned an …
Observance
US National Crème de Menthe Day
In 1885, a pharmacist named Émile Giffard was working in the western French city of Angers, studying the cooling and digestive properties of mint. He …
Observance
US National Creme Brulee Day
In 1691, a chef named François Massialot published a thick volume called Cuisinier royal et bourgeois, a handbook for the kitchens of the French …
Observance
US National Creamsicle Day
On a cold night in 1905, an eleven-year-old boy in Oakland, California, named Francis William Epperson left a cup of powdered soda mixed with water on …
Observance
US National Creampuff Day
A cream puff contains nothing but air, custard, and a thin golden shell, yet getting it right has defeated generations of cooks, because the pastry …
Observance
US National Crabmeat Day
The blue crab that dominates the Chesapeake Bay carries a scientific name that is essentially a compliment: Callinectes sapidus, which translates as …
Observance
US National Corned Beef Hash Day
The “corn” in corned beef is not corn at all. It is salt — specifically the coarse, grain-sized crystals, once likened to …
Observance
US National Corn on the cob day
In 1779, members of the Iroquois grew a sweet, eight-rowed, red-cobbed corn that European settlers recorded under the name “Papoon” — the …
Observance
US National Corn Fritter Day
In 1796, a domestic servant named Amelia Simmons published a slim book in Hartford, Connecticut, titled American Cookery. It is generally counted the …
Observance
US National Cognac Day
In the early 1620s, Dutch merchants sailing into the ports of the Charente, on France’s Atlantic coast, hit on a practical solution to a …
Observance
US National Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day
In 1999, the home economists at Whirlpool Home Appliances created a holiday to sell a chore. Reasoning that families would soon be cramming …
Observance
US National Clams on the Half Shell Day
Along the tidal mudflats of the Damariscotta River in Maine sit shell heaps so vast that nineteenth-century entrepreneurs mined them for chicken feed …
Observance
US National Chop Suey Day
In 1929 Edward Hopper painted two women at a table in a second-floor restaurant, a red-and-yellow “CHOP SUEY” sign glowing in the window …
Observance
US National Chips and Dip Day
Sometime in 1954, an unnamed home cook in California stirred a packet of Lipton’s dehydrated onion soup mix into a tub of sour cream and changed …
Observance
US National Chicken Wing Day
Late on the evening of 4 March 1964, Dominic Bellissimo was tending bar at the Anchor Bar on Main Street in Buffalo, New York, when a group of his …
Observance
US National Cherry Turnover Day
In a French boulangerie the closest relative of the cherry turnover has a far prettier name than the English word suggests. It is called a chausson …
Observance
US National Cherry Popsicle Day
One freezing night in 1905, an eleven-year-old boy in the San Francisco Bay Area called Frank Epperson left a cup of flavoured soda powder and water …
Observance
US National Cherry Popover Day
The word “popover” first appeared in print in an American letter written in 1850, and the first cookbook recipe for one followed in 1876, …
Observance
US National Ceviche Day
On the desert coast of northern Peru, more than a thousand years before a Spanish ship carried the first lime ashore, the fishermen of the Moche …
Observance
US National Caviar Day
In September 2005, the US Fish and Wildlife Service did something that would have astonished a nineteenth-century New Yorker: it banned the import of …
Observance
US National Catfish Day
On 25th June 1987, Ronald Reagan signed Proclamation 5672 and gave the United States a national day for, of all things, a whiskered pond fish. The …
Observance
US National Cassoulet Day
In the small Aude town of Issel, near Castelnaudary, an Italian potter set up a workshop in 1377 and began turning out a wide, deep, sloping-sided …
Observance
US National Cappuccino Day
On 5 September 1938, a Milanese named Giovanni Achille Gaggia filed patent number 365726 for a coffee machine that forced water over the grounds under …
Observance
US National Caesar Salad Day
On 4 July 1924, an Italian-born restaurateur named Caesar Cardini found his Tijuana dining room overrun. Americans had crossed the border from San …
Observance
US National Butterscotch Pudding Day
In 1817, a confectioner named Samuel Parkinson set up shop on the High Street in Doncaster, Yorkshire, and began boiling butter together with brown …
Observance
US National Brownie Day
In 1893, Bertha Palmer, the Chicago socialite running the Palmer House hotel with her husband Potter, gave her pastry kitchen an unusual brief. She …
Observance
US National Brisket Day
The same cut of beef sits at the heart of two of America’s most cherished food traditions, and the people who built them rarely met. In the …
Observance
US National Bologna Day
In 1883, a German immigrant named Oscar F. Mayer opened a meat market in Chicago, making sausages by hand before he ever ran a factory. Among the …
Observance
US National Biscotti Day
In 1858, in the old centre of Prato in Tuscany, a baker named Antonio Mattei opened a shop and began producing an almond biscuit that would make the …
Observance
US National Bicarbonate of Soda Day
In a dry valley northwest of Cairo called the Wadi Natrun, ancient Egyptian embalmers harvested a white, slightly bitter salt straight from the bed of …
Observance
US National BBQ Day
No government agency certifies National BBQ Day, no statute defines it, and even its date is unsettled — different food calendars place it on 16 May, …
Observance
US National Barbecue Day
On 4 July 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, towns across the country held public barbecues to mark the jubilee — and on that …
Observance
US National Baklava Day
On the fifteenth day of Ramadan, the Sultan in Istanbul would order trays of baklava distributed to the Janissaries, his elite household troops, who …
Observance
US National Anisette Day
In 1755, in the port city of Bordeaux, a woman named Marie Brizard nursed an ailing West Indian sailor back to health. In gratitude he gave her the …
Observance
US National Acorn Squash Day
Sometime in the 1800s a ridged green squash made an unlikely round trip: domesticated in the Americas thousands of years earlier, it was carried to …
Observance
US More Herbs, Less Salt Day
The average American consumes around 3,400 milligrams of sodium a day, more than double the 1,500 milligrams that bodies such as the American Heart …
Observance
US Macaroni Day
In 1802, a congressman from Massachusetts sat down to dinner at the President’s House and encountered something he could not identify. The …
Observance
US Haunted Refrigerator Night
The scariest thing in most American homes on the night of 30 October is not a costumed neighbour or a carved pumpkin. It is the unlabelled container …
Observance
US Gummi Worm Day
In 1981, in the Bavarian town of Fürth, the German confectioner Trolli ran a brightly coloured, two-tone, faintly grotesque sweet off a brass lathe …
Observance
US Fresh Spinach Day
In June 1931, a wiry cartoon sailor with a corncob pipe squeezed a tin of spinach into his mouth, swelled with sudden muscle, and changed the eating …
Observance
US Family Day
In 1996, researchers at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, then based at Columbia University, published a finding that surprised …
Observance
US Eat Beans Day
The common bean was domesticated not once but twice — independently, in two places, by two peoples who had no contact with one another. Genetic …
Observance
US Crackers Over The Keyboard Day
In 1983 the linguistically minded programmers who maintained the Jargon File, the long-running dictionary of hacker slang, drew a line in the sand. …
Observance
US Cook Something Bold and Pungent Day
Cut into a raw onion and your eyes sting within seconds. The reason is a tiny, volatile molecule called syn-propanethial-S-oxide, manufactured on the …
Observance
US Carbonated Beverage with Caffeine Day
In May 1886, a Confederate veteran and pharmacist named John Stith Pemberton began selling a dark syrup from the soda fountain at Jacobs’ …
Observance
United Nations Public Service Day
On 20 December 2002, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 57/277 and, in a single clause, gave a name to a category of work that …
Observance
United Nations Day
At an opera house in San Francisco in the spring of 1945, with the war in Europe in its final weeks, delegates from fifty nations spent two months …
Observance
Unesco World Teachers’ Day
On 5 October 1966, delegates meeting in Paris adopted a document few people outside the profession have ever read but which has shaped teaching ever …
Observance
Underwear Day
On 5 August 2003, the New York online retailer Freshpair sent models in nothing but their underwear into some of the busiest spots in Manhattan, …
Observance
Umbrella day
In 1756, the London merchant and philanthropist Jonas Hanway began walking the streets of the capital holding an umbrella over his head, and was …
Observance
U.A.E Commemoration Day
On the morning of 30 November 1971, two days before the United Arab Emirates was founded, Iranian forces landed on the island of Greater Tunb in the …
Observance
Towel Day
On 14 May 2001, three days after Douglas Adams died of a heart attack in Santa Barbara at the age of forty-nine, a fan named D. Clyde Williamson …
Observance
Tortilla Chip Day
In a tortilla factory in southwest Los Angeles in the 1940s, an automated press kept spitting out tortillas too misshapen to sell. Rebecca Webb …
Observance
Tin Can Day
On 19 January 1825, two New Yorkers named Ezra Daggett and Thomas Kensett were granted a United States patent for preserving food — salmon, oysters …
Observance
Thread The Needle Day
In 2016, archaeologists working in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia recovered a slender, polished bone needle about seven …
Observance
Thinking Day
In 1926, in a wooded camp on the Hudson River north of New York City, delegates to the fourth World Conference of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts hit on a …
Observance
Thesis day
On 31 October 1517, an Augustinian friar and theology professor named Martin Luther produced ninety-five theses — short, numbered propositions …
Observance
Thesaurus Day
Peter Mark Roget was eight years old when he began making lists. By the time he was a child of obsessive habits, cataloguing and classifying the world …
Observance
Tell a fairy tale day
Sometime around 7 BCE, the Greek geographer Strabo wrote down a story about a slave girl named Rhodopis. An eagle, he reported, snatched one of her …
Observance
Tailors Day
At the western end of a short London street between Regent Street and Burlington Gardens, a tailoring firm called Henry Poole & Co opened an …
Observance
Sunglasses Day
The Roman writer Pliny the Elder recorded that the emperor Nero watched gladiatorial combats through a polished emerald, and ever since people have …
Observance
St Georges Day
The man England celebrates on 23 April was, almost certainly, never in England. He spoke Greek, soldiered in the Roman army, and was executed for his …
Observance
Spreadsheet Day
On 17 October 1979 a small Boston software house called Personal Software put a programme on sale for the Apple II that did something no microcomputer …
Observance
Something on a stick day
Picture an early human crouched beside a fire, having just made a small but decisive discovery: jam the meat onto a green branch and you can hold it …
Observance
Social Media Day
In June 2010 the technology news site Mashable did something faintly contradictory: it asked the people who lived their lives online to leave their …
Observance
Smoke and mirrors day
In the summer of 1975, as the dust of Watergate was still settling, the American journalist Jimmy Breslin reached for a phrase to describe how …
Observance
Skyscraper Day
When the ten-storey Home Insurance Building opened in Chicago in 1885, it did something no large building had done before: it hung its walls on a …
Observance
Siblings Day
Claudia Evart lost her sister Lisette in a car accident when the two were teenagers, and fourteen years later lost her brother Alan to a second …
Observance
Sewing Machine Day
Elias Howe spent the early 1840s watching his wife take in piecework sewing to keep the household afloat in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and convinced …
Observance
Serpent day
On a gold death mask made for the boy-king Tutankhamun around 1323 BC, a cobra rears above the forehead, hood spread, ready to spit fire at the …
Observance
Serendipity Day
On 28 January 1754, the English writer and politician Horace Walpole sat down to write to his friend Horace Mann and, almost in passing, invented a …
Observance
Save Your Photos Day
A glass-plate negative made in 1860 can still be printed today; you hold it to the light and there is the image, perfectly legible 165 years on. A …
Observance
Sandcastle Day
On 2 July 2021, in the Danish seaside town of Blokhus, thirty of the world’s most skilled sand sculptors finished a pyramid of damp sand that …
Observance
Roots Day
In 1976 an American writer named Alex Haley published a book that sent millions of people rummaging through attics, registry offices and the memories …
Observance
Red Hand Day
On 12 February 2002, a piece of international law that had taken years to negotiate finally came into force: the Optional Protocol to the Convention …
Observance
Random act of kindness day
Sometime in 1982, in a restaurant in Sausalito, California, a writer named Anne Herbert wrote a sentence on a placemat: “Practise random …
Observance
Racial harmony day
On 21 July 1964, a procession in Singapore marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad turned to violence on Geylang Serai, and by the time the …
Observance
Quaid-e-Azam Day
On 25 December 1876, in a house known as Wazir Mansion in the port city of Karachi, then part of British India, a merchant’s son named …
Observance
Put on your own Shoes Day
Ask any parent to name the small, hard-won victories of early childhood and the chances are that putting on shoes will be among them. The wrestle with …
Observance
Purple Day
In 2008, a nine-year-old girl in Nova Scotia asked her mother a deceptively simple question: why wasn’t there a day for epilepsy, the way there …
Observance
Psychic Day
In the spring of 1848, in a small farmhouse at Hydesville, New York, two teenage sisters named Maggie and Kate Fox convinced their mother, then their …
Observance
Pravasi Bharatiya Divas
On 9 January 1915, a 45-year-old lawyer stepped off a ship at the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, having spent twenty-one years in South Africa. He had gone …
Observance
Praline day
A praline ordered in Brussels and a praline ordered in New Orleans have almost nothing in common. The first is a small filled chocolate, a glossy …
Observance
Poultry day
In the dry season of central Thailand, perhaps three and a half thousand years ago, a wild bird with a brilliant red comb began to linger near the new …
Observance
Poinsettia Day
On 12 December 1851, Joel Roberts Poinsett died at Stateburg, South Carolina, a former congressman, the first United States Minister to Mexico and a …
Observance
Pohela Boishakh
In 1584, the Mughal emperor Akbar grew frustrated with a calendar that refused to keep step with the harvest. His administration in Bengal collected …
Observance
Poets Day
Before anyone could write a poem down, people were already reciting them. The oldest named author in human history is not a king or a general but a …
Observance
Pocky Day
Write the date 11 November in figures and you get 11/11, four slim vertical strokes standing in a row. To the marketing department of the Japanese …
Observance
Plimsoll day
On 10 February 1824 a child was born in Bristol who would, half a century later, stand in the House of Commons shaking his fist at the Speaker and …
Observance
Pistachio Day
In the highlands of what is now north-eastern Iran, archaeologists have found traces of pistachio gathering reaching back roughly nine thousand years, …
Observance
Pi Approximation Day
In the third century BC, a man in Syracuse drew a 96-sided polygon and concluded that the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter was …
Observance
Pepero Day
The first documented trace of Pepero Day appears in a South Korean news report from 1996, describing a habit among teenage girls in the Busan area: …
Observance
Pencil day
On 30 March 1858, a Philadelphia stationer named Hymen Lipman was granted United States patent number 19,783 for a deceptively simple idea: a pencil …
Observance
Peculiar People Day
In 1838, in the Essex market town of Rochford, a farm labourer’s son named James Banyard left the Wesleyan Methodists and founded a small …
Observance
Patriot Day
At 8:46 a.m. on 11 September 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Seventeen minutes later, United …
Observance
Pardon Day
On Sunday 8 September 1974, Gerald Ford sat alone at his Oval Office desk and signed Proclamation 4311, granting Richard Nixon “a full, free, …
Observance
Opposite Day
A child is told to tidy a bedroom, plants both feet, grins, and announces that it is Opposite Day, so “yes” actually means …
Observance
Old Rock Day
In 2001, a research team led by Simon Wilde dated a single grain of zircon from the Jack Hills of Western Australia to roughly 4.4 billion years, …
Observance
Odie Day
On 8 August 1978, a few weeks after Jim Davis’s Garfield strip began its national syndication, a yellow, floppy-eared dog padded into the comic …
Observance
Oatmeal Muffin Day
The oatmeal muffin is the product of an unlikely marriage: a grain that fed Scottish farm labourers through brutal winters, and a chemical leavening …
Observance
New Zealand Waitangi Day
On the afternoon of 6 February 1840, on a lawn in front of James Busby’s house at Waitangi in the Bay of Islands, the northern chief Hōne Heke …
Observance
New Years Eve
At the very end of 1907, the owner of The New York Times, Adolph Ochs, had a problem. The city had just banned the fireworks displays he had used to …
Observance
New Years Day
On 1 January 45 BCE, the Roman calendar quietly slipped its moorings. Julius Caesar, advised by the Alexandrian astronomer Sosigenes, had just …
Observance
National Tweed Day
The most famous cloth in Scotland is named after a mistake. Sometime in the 1830s a London merchant received a letter from a Hawick firm in the …
Observance
National Sports Day
At the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a slight Indian field hockey captain named Dhyan Chand walked onto a rain-soaked pitch against the host nation, removed …
Observance
National Nothing Day
In 1972 a newspaperman in California grew tired of opening his post to find yet another group lobbying him to write about their freshly minted special …
Observance
National Cornchip Day
On 10 July 1932, a small advertisement appeared in the San Antonio Express. A Oaxacan soccer coach named Gustavo Olguin, who had settled in Texas, was …
Observance
National Coming Out Day
On 11 October 1987, around half a million people marched on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, filling the Mall in one of the largest civil-rights …
Observance
National Bouillabaisse Day
In 1980, eleven restaurateurs in Marseille sat down together and did something a dish rarely inspires: they wrote a constitution for it. The …
Observance
National Boss's Day
In 1958, a secretary at the State Farm Insurance office in Deerfield, Illinois, walked into the United States Chamber of Commerce and registered a …
Observance
Namesake day
Among Ashkenazi Jewish families there is a long-standing rule that you name a child only after a relative who has died — never one still living. …
Observance
Name Yourself Day
Thomas and Ruth Roy have invented dozens of holidays. Working under the banner of Wellcat Holidays in Pennsylvania, the couple are responsible for a …
Observance
Mole Day
On 15 May 1991, a high-school chemistry teacher in the small Wisconsin town of Prairie du Chien filed the paperwork to found the National Mole Day …
Observance
Mochi Day
Two people stand over a heavy wooden mortar in a temple courtyard. One swings a long-handled mallet; the other reaches in between the blows, …
Observance
Military Spouse Appreciation Day
On 17 April 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed Proclamation 5184, designating 23 May that year as Military Spouse Day. The text singled out …
Observance
Measure your feet day
The gap between a size seven and a size eight shoe is exactly one third of an inch, and that oddly specific figure is a fossil. It comes from the …
Observance
Mead Day
In 2002 the American Homebrewers Association, based in Boulder, Colorado, picked a Saturday in August and declared it National Mead Day, asking …
Observance
May Day
On the evening of 4 May 1886, a labour rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago was breaking up in light rain when someone threw a homemade bomb into a …
Observance
Malaysia Day
At a few minutes past nine on the morning of 16 September 1963, Tunku Abdul Rahman stood before a crowd at Stadium Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur and read …
Observance
Malala Day
On 9 October 2012, a gunman from the Pakistani Taliban boarded a school bus in the Swat Valley, asked for one girl by name and shot her in the head. …
Observance
Make Your Dream Come True Day
On 1 January 1953, a Norwegian schoolteacher named Edmund Hillary wrote in his diary that he intended to climb Everest that spring. He was not yet …
Observance
Make a friend day
In January 2018, the British government did something no government had done before: it appointed a Minister for Loneliness. The post was created by …
Observance
Look for an Evergreen Day
High in the White Mountains of eastern California stands a Great Basin bristlecone pine known as Methuselah, a gnarled, wind-scoured evergreen that …
Observance
Look Alike Day
Some time in the 1980s, a television reporter named Jack Etzel was wandering downtown Pittsburgh with his cameraman, Rick Minutello, hunting for a …
Observance
Lips apreciation day
In the royal tombs of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, archaeologists led by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s uncovered the burial of a woman now usually …
Observance
Lineman Day
On the night of 10 July 1896, in a thunderstorm over Washington, D.C., a forty-three-year-old man climbed a utility pole to restore power that the …
Observance
Lima Bean Respect Day
Archaeologists digging in the dry coastal valleys of Peru have pulled lima beans out of the ground that are roughly 4,000 years old, and in the arid …
Observance
Lighthouse Day
On 7 August 1789, barely two months into the life of the United States and before its congressmen had even agreed how much to pay themselves, the …
Observance
Letter Writing Day
In 1837 a retired English schoolmaster named Rowland Hill published a pamphlet arguing that the entire British postal system was broken. At the time, …
Observance
Kargil Vijay Diwas
Imagine being ordered to attack uphill, in thin air at over 16,000 feet, across bare rock and ice, toward an enemy dug into commanding positions on …
Observance
Jellyfish Day
A jellyfish has no brain, no heart, no bones and no blood, and yet it has outlasted nearly everything that ever tried to design something better. The …
Observance
Italian National Espresso Day
On 16 May 1884, at the General Exposition in Turin, a businessman named Angelo Moriondo unveiled a contraption of boilers and pipes that could brew …
Observance
Iqbal Day
In 1930, at the annual session of the All-India Muslim League in Allahabad, a frail-looking lawyer with a heavy moustache rose to give the …
Observance
International Youth Day
In August 1998, ministers from around the world gathered in Lisbon for the first World Conference of Ministers Responsible for Youth, hosted by the …
Observance
International Widows Day
In 1954, in the small town of Dhilwan in the Punjab, a thirty-seven-year-old woman named Pushpa Wati Loomba lost her husband. Her ten-year-old son …
Observance
International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development
On 17 December 1985, the United Nations General Assembly passed a short resolution numbered 40/212 that did something quietly unusual: it set aside an …
Observance
International Skeptics Day
Around 300 BC, a Greek philosopher named Pyrrho of Elis reportedly travelled as far as India in the entourage of Alexander the Great, met the …
Observance
International Scouts Day
On the morning of 1 August 1907, twenty boys stepped off a boat onto Brownsea Island, a wooded lump of land in Poole Harbour on England’s south …
Observance
International Romani Day
Between 7 and 12 April 1971, twenty-three delegates from ten countries gathered in a hall at Orpington, on the edge of London, for a meeting that had …
Observance
International No Diet Day
The first International No Diet Day was supposed to happen in Hyde Park. In 1992, the British activist Mary Evans Young invited a small group of women …
Observance
International Midwives Day
The first International Day of the Midwife, on 5 May 1991, carried a slogan that now reads as both hopeful and unmet: “Towards safe birth for …
Observance
International Mens Day
In 1999, a history lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago picked a date for a new observance partly because it was his …
Observance
International Louie Louie Day
In 1959, needing cash to pay for his wedding, the Los Angeles singer Richard Berry sold the rights to a song he had written for 750 dollars. The song …
Observance
International Lefthanders Day
In 1976, a left-handed man from Topeka, Kansas named Dean R. Campbell decided that the world’s southpaws needed a day of their own. Campbell ran …
Observance
International Hummus Day
In 2012, an eighteen-year-old named Ben Lang noticed that Nutella had its own day. World Nutella Day had become a cheerful annual fixture online, and …
Observance
International Day of the African Child
On the morning of 16 June 1976, a column of perhaps ten thousand pupils set out through the dusty streets of Soweto, the sprawling township south-west …
Observance
International Day of Cooperatives
On a damp December evening in 1844, twenty-eight working men unlocked the door of a rented cellar at 31 Toad Lane in Rochdale, Lancashire, and put …
Observance
International Customs Day
On 26 January 1953, delegates from seventeen countries, most of them Western European, gathered in Brussels for the inaugural session of a new body …
Observance
Innovation Day
In 1948, a manager at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, better known as 3M, made an unusual decision. William L. McKnight, the …
Observance
Indian Army Day
On 15 January 1949, Lieutenant General Kodandera Madappa Cariappa took over command of the Indian Army from General Sir Francis Roy Bucher, the last …
Observance
Indian Akshay Urja Day
On 20 August 2004, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy held the first Akshay Urja Day with a piece of theatre that suited the message: more than …
Observance
India National Youth Day
In September 1893, a thirty-year-old Bengali monk in an ochre robe stepped onto the stage of the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, …
Observance
India National Voters Day
On 25 January 1950, one day before India formally became a republic, the Election Commission of India came into being. Sixty-one years later, in 2011, …
Observance
Hobbit Day
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” J. R. R. Tolkien wrote that sentence, the story goes, on a blank page he found while …
Observance
Hindi Day
On 14 September 1949, after three years of some of the most ill-tempered debate the Constituent Assembly of India ever held, the framers of the …
Observance
Hawaian flag day
On the morning of 31 July 1843, on a dusty plain east of Honolulu, a British rear-admiral named Richard Darton Thomas ordered the Union Jack lowered …
Observance
Hari Merdeka
A few minutes before midnight on 30 August 1957, the lights at the Royal Selangor Club Padang in Kuala Lumpur were switched off, and a crowd stood in …
Observance
Handwriting day
In 1977, a trade body called the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association, worried that the typewriter and the telephone were quietly killing off …
Observance
Handcuff day
In 1862, in the United States, an inventor named W. V. Adams filed a patent that quietly changed policing forever: the first adjustable ratchet …
Observance
Halloween
Two thousand years ago, on the hills of ancient Ireland and Britain, the Celts gathered at the close of the harvest to light great bonfires and drive …
Observance
Gymnastics Day
On a patch of open heathland at Hasenheide, on the southern edge of Berlin, a fiery Prussian schoolmaster named Friedrich Ludwig Jahn opened the first …
Observance
Greenery Day
When Emperor Hirohito died on 7 January 1989, the Japanese government faced an oddly delicate calendar problem. His birthday, 29 April, had been a …
Observance
Granola bar Day
The granola bar wedged in your coat pocket is the unlikely descendant of a nineteenth-century health crusade and a twentieth-century patent dispute. …
Observance
Good Governance Day India
On 25 December 2014, while much of the world marked Christmas, the government of India inaugurated a holiday of an entirely different character. The …
Observance
Global Information Governance Day
In 2012, three men with backgrounds in records management and analytics decided that one of the least celebrated disciplines in the modern …
Observance
Global Handwashing Day
In the summer of 2008, in a conference hall in Stockholm, a coalition of public-health bodies and consumer-goods giants did something faintly …
Observance
Global Dignity Day
The idea took shape among an unlikely trio: a future king, a Finnish philosopher and an American banker turned anti-poverty campaigner. Crown Prince …
Observance
Global Day of Parents
On 17 September 2012, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 66/292 and, in a few sober paragraphs, created the Global Day of Parents. …
Observance
German-American Day
On 6 October 1683, a small ship called the Concord dropped anchor at Philadelphia carrying thirteen German families from Krefeld, in the Rhineland. …
Observance
German Unity Day
At the stroke of midnight on 3 October 1990, a black, red and gold flag was raised in front of the Reichstag in Berlin while a crowd of perhaps a …
Observance
German Butterbrot Day
In 1999, Germany’s agricultural marketing board looked at the country’s eating habits and grew worried about a sandwich. The single slice …
Observance
Geek Pride Day
On 25 May 2006, roughly 300 people gathered in the Plaza de Callao in central Madrid and arranged themselves into a living, walking game of Pac-Man, …
Observance
Gandhi Jayanthi
On 2 October 1869, in the coastal town of Porbandar on the Kathiawar peninsula of western India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born into a Hindu …
Observance
Foursquare Day
In early 2010, a Tampa Bay optometrist named Nate Bonilla-Warford posted an idea to a Foursquare community forum. He was amused, by his own account, …
Observance
Fire Prevention Day
On the evening of 8 October 1871, a fire broke out in or near a barn on DeKoven Street, on the West Side of Chicago. The city was timber-built and …
Observance
Fête de la Musique
On the evening of 21 June 1982, France’s new Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, called for an experiment that nobody could be sure would work: he …
Observance
Festivus
On 18 December 1997, an episode of Seinfeld titled “The Strike” introduced America to a holiday with an unadorned aluminium pole, a ritual …
Observance
Fathers Day
On a Sunday in May 1909, Sonora Smart Dodd sat in the Central Methodist Episcopal Church in Spokane, Washington, listening to a sermon in honour of …
Observance
Fairy Day
In the summer of 1917, in the West Yorkshire village of Cottingley, a sixteen-year-old named Elsie Wright borrowed her father’s camera and …
Observance
Evaluate Your Life Day
In 399 BC, an elderly Athenian stood before a jury that had just sentenced him to death and refused the obvious bargain. Socrates could have escaped …
Observance
Encourage a Young Writer Day
The Brontë children produced miniature handmade books, stitched and written in a script so tiny it almost needs a magnifying glass to read, years …
Observance
Dydd Santes Dwynwen
On a small tidal island off the south-western coast of Anglesey stand the weathered ruins of a church, beside a holy well in which, according to a …
Observance
Dress in blue day
In 2006, an entire school in Texas swapped its plaid uniforms for blue jeans and blue shirts, and hundreds of pupils arrived clutching dollar bills …
Observance
Ditch New Years Resolutions Day
By the seventeenth of January, the gym is already emptying out. Research on resolution-keepers suggests that roughly a quarter of people who make a …
Observance
Disc Jockey day
In 1935, a New York radio announcer named Martin Block had a problem: he had airtime to fill on WNEW and almost no live music to fill it with. So he …
Observance
Digital learning day
On 1 February 2012, teachers in thirty-nine American states switched on whatever screens their schools could muster and tried something new in front …
Observance
Dictionary Day
In 1807, a Connecticut schoolmaster sat down to write a dictionary and did not finish it for twenty-one years. Noah Webster taught himself twenty-six …
Observance
Defense Day
Before dawn on 6 September 1965, Indian troops crossed the international border and drove towards Lahore, one of Pakistan’s largest cities, …
Observance
Day of the Seafarer
On 25 June 2010, in a conference hall at the Philippine International Convention Center in Manila, delegates from across the world’s shipping …
Observance
Day of Silence
In 1996, an eighteen-year-old University of Virginia student named Maria Pulzetti was taking a class on the Civil Rights Movement and writing a paper …
Observance
Day of Dialogue
In the spring of 2005, more than a thousand American students at some three hundred and fifty schools wore T-shirts, handed out cards and started …
Observance
Data privacy day
On 28 January 1981, in Strasbourg, a group of delegates from the Council of Europe put their signatures to a document with the unglamorous title …
Observance
Creamsicle Day
The Creamsicle did not begin as a Creamsicle. It began, by the usual account, with an eleven-year-old boy named Frank Epperson in the San Francisco …
Observance
Cosmonautics Day
At 9:07 in the morning, Moscow time, on 12 April 1961, a twenty-seven-year-old Soviet Air Force lieutenant strapped into a metal sphere atop a rocket …
Observance
Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Action Day
The date of 19 April was chosen for an unusually pointed reason: it is the anniversary of a legal victory. For two years, the phrase “Congenital …
Observance
Commonwealth Day
In 1898, in an Ontario schoolroom, a teacher named Clementina Trenholme had her pupils mark the last school day before 24 May — Queen Victoria’s …
Observance
Columnists Day
On 18 April 1945, on the small island of Ie Shima off Okinawa, a Japanese machine-gun opened up on a jeep carrying American troops and a civilian. The …
Observance
Coast Guard Day
In the summer of 1790, the United States had an army and the beginnings of a navy on paper, but almost nothing afloat. The Continental Navy had been …
Observance
Clam Chowder day
In chapter fifteen of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville pauses the hunt for a meal. Ishmael and Queequeg arrive cold and hungry at the Try Pots inn on …
Observance
Citizens Day
On 19 November 1948, a former American bomber pilot named Garry Davis stood up in the middle of a United Nations General Assembly session in Paris and …
Observance
Cities for Life Day
On the evening of 30 November, the floodlights pick out the Colosseum in Rome and hold it in a steady golden glow. The same thing happens to the town …
Observance
Chokolate mint day
In 1962, a confectioner named Brian Sollitt stood in a kitchen at the Rowntree factory in York, trying to coax a peppermint fondant to behave. The …
Observance
Cherish an Antique Day
When the United States Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, it needed a legal line between an antique, which could enter the country …
Observance
Card Playing Day
The earliest written mention of playing cards we possess comes from a Chinese text describing how, around the year 868, Princess Tongchang, daughter …
Observance
Car insurance day
On 18 August 1925, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed the Compulsory Automobile Liability Security Act, and the following year it became the …
Observance
Caps Lock Day
In 2000, an American software developer named Derek Arnold, fed up with people SHOUTING AT ONE ANOTHER in online forums, declared 22 October to be …
Observance
Canada Day
On a July afternoon in 1982, with the House of Commons nearly empty, a private member’s bill to rename Canada’s national holiday slid …
Observance
Camera day
Some time in 1826 or 1827, a French gentleman-inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce set a polished pewter plate, coated in a tar-like bitumen, inside …
Observance
Camcorder day
In 1983, Sony shipped a black, wedge-shaped device called the Betamovie that did something no consumer product had managed before: it put the camera …
Observance
Cambodian arbor day
Each 9 July, the King of Cambodia kneels in the soil of a different province and plants a tree with his own hands. In 2023 it was Kampong Cham, where …
Observance
Buttercrunch day
In the spring of 1923, a confectioner named Harry Brown carried a tray of his newest experiment down to the public library in Tacoma, Washington, and …
Observance
Burns Night
On 21 July 1801, nine men sat down to dinner in a low, whitewashed cottage in Alloway, two miles south of Ayr. The cottage had been built by hand …
Observance
Buffet day
The word “buffet” began life as a piece of furniture. In seventeenth-century France a buffet was a sideboard — an ornate cabinet on which …
Observance
Bubblegum day
In 1928, a 23-year-old accountant at the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia was tinkering with gum recipes that were none of his business. …
Observance
Bubble Wrap Appreciation day
On a Monday in late January 2001, a package of microphones arrived at Spirit 95, a radio station in Bloomington, Indiana. Someone began unwrapping it …
Observance
Bubble Bath Day
In 1961, a North Dakota businessman named Harold Schafer was lying awake when a late-night radio advert for the foam cleaner Mr. Clean drifted through …
Observance
Brazilian National Muffin Day
The word “muffin” first appears in print in 1703, spelled “moofin”, and even then nobody was quite sure where it came from. It …
Observance
Brazilian National Mate Day
In 1819, a French naturalist named Augustin Saint-Hilaire, travelling through South America, gave a botanical name to the plant behind a drink that …
Observance
Brazilian National Cocoa Day
By 1986, Bahia was shipping almost 400,000 tonnes of cocoa a year, and cacao exports alone made up roughly half of the state’s total trade. …
Observance
Boxing Day
On 7 August 1871, a Liberal MP and banker named Sir John Lubbock secured Royal Assent for the Bank Holidays Act, a short piece of legislation that, …
Observance
Bourbon Day
On 4 May 1964, a concurrent resolution of the United States Congress declared bourbon “a distinctive product of the United States”, a …
Observance
Bonfire Night
In the small hours of 5 November 1605, a search party working its way through the cellars beneath the House of Lords found a tall, dark-bearded man …
Observance
Black Day
On 14 April, while couples elsewhere are still basking in the afterglow of February’s flowers and March’s chocolates, single people across …
Observance
Biodiesel day
At the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, visitors filed past a small engine built by the Otto company and watched it run with such smoothness that …
Observance
Bikini Day
On 5 July 1946, at the Piscine Molitor swimming pool in Paris, a 19-year-old nude dancer named Micheline Bernardini stepped out wearing four triangles …
Observance
Bicycle Day
At twenty past four on the afternoon of 19 April 1943, in a laboratory in wartime Basel, a Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann swallowed 0.25 …
Observance
Bennington Battle Day
“There are the redcoats, and they are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow.” Those words, spoken by General John Stark to his …
Observance
Beef jerky day
When Spanish chroniclers climbed into the Andes in the 1530s, they found Inca storehouses — the qollqa — packed with strips of dried llama and alpaca …
Observance
Battery day
In the spring of 1800, Alessandro Volta wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society in London, describing a peculiar tower he had built …
Observance
Bathtub Day
Around five thousand years ago, in the planned city of Mohenjo-daro on the floodplain of the Indus, builders laid down a watertight brick basin some …
Observance
Ball Point Pen Day
On 10 June 1943, in Buenos Aires, a Hungarian émigré named László Bíró registered an Argentine patent for a pen that did not blot, did not need …
Observance
Back To The Future Day
At one minute past four in the afternoon on 21 October 2015, a DeLorean lands in a back alley and Doc Brown climbs out, his hair wild, telling Marty …
Observance
Autistic Pride Day
The date was chosen almost by accident. When the campaigning group Aspies For Freedom marked the first Autistic Pride Day on 18 June 2005, they picked …
Observance
Australia Day
On 26 January 1788, eleven ships of the First Fleet, having sailed from Portsmouth eight months earlier with around 1,400 people aboard, many of them …
Observance
Africa Industrialization Day
In December 1989, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 44/237 and fixed 20 November as Africa Industrialization Day. The timing was …
Observance
Acceptance day
In 2004, a student at the University of Illinois named Annie Hopkins sketched a simple logo for a dorm-room T-shirt: a wheelchair with its wheel …