The Almanac
Special days
927 days worth celebrating — one for almost every occasion. Find today’s, see what’s coming up, or browse the whole calendar.
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January
1
National Bloody Mary DayFoodIn 1934, a young French bartender named Fernand Petiot stepped behind the bar of the King Cole Room at the St. …1
New Years DayObservanceOn 1 January 45 BCE, the Roman calendar quietly slipped its moorings. Julius Caesar, advised by the …2
Buffet dayObservanceThe word “buffet” began life as a piece of furniture. In seventeenth-century France a buffet was a …2
National Cream Puff DayFoodIn the kitchens of the early nineteenth century, a Parisian pastry chef named Marie-Antoine Carême, the man …2
US National Creampuff DayObservanceA cream puff contains nothing but air, custard, and a thin golden shell, yet getting it right has defeated …3
Fruitcake Toss DayFunSometime in the mid-1990s, a handful of residents of Manitou Springs, Colorado, were nursing drinks at a bar …3
US National Chocolate Covered Cherry DayFoodIn eighteenth-century France, confectioners began making a sweet called griottes — long-stalked sour cherries …4
Myanmar Independence DayHistoryAt twenty minutes past four in the morning on 4 January 1948, while most of the country was still asleep, …4
US National Spaghetti DayFoodAround 1154, an Arab geographer named Muhammad al-Idrisi, working at the court of King Roger II of Sicily, …4
World Braille DayAwarenessA French army captain wanted his soldiers to read orders in the dark without striking a light that would …5
US National Whipped Cream DayObservanceIn December 1947, a St Louis businessman named Aaron Lapin walked into the offices of America’s largest …6
National Shortbread DayFoodThere is a recipe Scottish bakers still recite like a charm: one, two, three. One part sugar, two parts …6
National Watoto Literature DayCultureThe word at the heart of this day is watoto, the Swahili plural for “children” — the same language …7
National Tempura DayFoodSometime in the 1540s, Portuguese ships made landfall in southern Japan, and with the traders and Jesuit …7
Old Rock DayObservanceIn 2001, a research team led by Simon Wilde dated a single grain of zircon from the Jack Hills of Western …8
Bubble Bath DayObservanceIn 1961, a North Dakota businessman named Harold Schafer was lying awake when a late-night radio advert for …8
National English Toffee DayFoodIn 1825 a new word slipped into the Oxford English Dictionary: toffee, set down in print for the first time, …9
National Apricot DayFoodThe Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century, described a kind of early-ripening fruit …9
Pravasi Bharatiya DivasObservanceOn 9 January 1915, a 45-year-old lawyer stepped off a ship at the Apollo Bunder in Bombay, having spent …9
US National Cassoulet DayObservanceIn the small Aude town of Issel, near Castelnaudary, an Italian potter set up a workshop in 1377 and began …10
Bittersweet Chocolate DayFoodBreak a square of fine bittersweet chocolate and listen for the snap. That clean, brittle crack is the sound …10
Houseplant Appreciation DayNatureThe Christmas tree has been hauled out to the kerb, the tinsel is back in its box, and the corner where the …10
Peculiar People DayObservanceIn 1838, in the Essex market town of Rochford, a farm labourer’s son named James Banyard left the …11
German Apples DayFoodStand in the Altes Land marshes south-west of Hamburg in early May and you are surrounded by one of the …11
National Human Trafficking Awareness DayAwarenessOn 22 June 2007, the United States Senate passed a concurrent resolution, S.Con.Res. 40, designating 11 …11
National Milk DayFoodOn 11 January 1878, a man named Alexander Campbell, working for the New York Dairy Company, sent out milk in …12
Curried Chicken DayFoodIn 1747 a London author who signed herself simply “A Lady” — the cookery writer Hannah Glasse — …12
India National Youth DayObservanceIn September 1893, a thirty-year-old Bengali monk in an ochre robe stepped onto the stage of the World’s …13
International Skeptics DayObservanceAround 300 BC, a Greek philosopher named Pyrrho of Elis reportedly travelled as far as India in the entourage …13
Make Your Dream Come True DayObservanceOn 1 January 1953, a Norwegian schoolteacher named Edmund Hillary wrote in his diary that he intended to climb …13
National Peach Melba DayFoodIn 1892 the Australian soprano Nellie Melba sang the title role in Wagner’s Lohengrin at Covent Garden, …14
Dress Up Your Pet DayAnimalsIn 2009, the pet lifestyle expert and animal behaviourist Colleen Paige added another date to a calendar she …14
National Hot Pastrami Sandwich DayFoodIn 1887, on Delancey Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a Lithuanian kosher butcher named Sussman …15
Indian Army DayObservanceOn 15 January 1949, Lieutenant General Kodandera Madappa Cariappa took over command of the Indian Army from …16
Appreciate a Dragon DayAnimalsIn 2004 the American fantasy author Donita K. Paul wanted a memorable way to mark the launch of her novel …16
National Nothing DayObservanceIn 1972 a newspaperman in California grew tired of opening his post to find yet another group lobbying him to …17
Ditch New Years Resolutions DayObservanceBy the seventeenth of January, the gym is already emptying out. Research on resolution-keepers suggests that …18
Thesaurus DayObservancePeter Mark Roget was eight years old when he began making lists. By the time he was a child of obsessive …18
Winnie the Pooh DayObservanceAlan Alexander Milne was born in London on 18 January 1882, and it is his birthday, rather than any date drawn …19
Tin Can DayObservanceOn 19 January 1825, two New Yorkers named Ezra Daggett and Thomas Kensett were granted a United States patent …19
US National Popcorn DayFoodIn 1948 and 1950, two Harvard graduate students, the anthropologist Herbert Dick and the botanist Earle Smith, …20
Acceptance dayObservanceIn 2004, a student at the University of Illinois named Annie Hopkins sketched a simple logo for a dorm-room …20
Buttercrunch dayObservanceIn the spring of 1923, a confectioner named Harry Brown carried a tray of his newest experiment down to the …20
Camcorder dayObservanceIn 1983, Sony shipped a black, wedge-shaped device called the Betamovie that did something no consumer product …20
Disc Jockey dayObservanceIn 1935, a New York radio announcer named Martin Block had a problem: he had airtime to fill on WNEW and …20
Penguin awareness dayAnimalsBy most accounts, Penguin Awareness Day began with a husband writing on his wife’s calendar. The date …20
US Cheese DayFoodIn the spring of 1851, a dairy farmer named Jesse Williams pooled the milk from his own farm in Rome, New York …21
Granola bar DayObservanceThe granola bar wedged in your coat pocket is the unlikely descendant of a nineteenth-century health crusade …21
National Hug DayFunIn 1986, a young University of Michigan psychology graduate named Kevin Zaborney looked at the calendar and …22
US National Hot Sauce DayObservanceIn 1868, a ruined Maryland-born banker named Edmund McIlhenny planted his first commercial crop of small red …23
Handwriting dayObservanceIn 1977, a trade body called the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association, worried that the typewriter and …23
Icelandic ThorrablotCultureOn a Friday in the dead of the Icelandic winter, when the wind drives off the North Atlantic and the daylight …23
Iranian National Pie DayFoodSomewhere around the tenth century, an Abbasid court poet named Ishaq al-Mawsili wrote verses praising a small …23
Measure your feet dayObservanceThe gap between a size seven and a size eight shoe is exactly one third of an inch, and that oddly specific …23
US National Pie DayFoodSometime in the mid-1970s, a Boulder schoolteacher and nuclear engineer named Charlie Papazian decided that …24
International Day of EducationAwarenessOn 3 December 2018, the United Nations General Assembly passed, by consensus, a resolution that had been put …24
Moebius Syndrome Awareness DayAwarenessIn 1888, the German neurologist Paul Julius Möbius published a description of a rare condition in which a …24
US National Peanut Butter DayFoodIn 1884, a Montreal chemist named Marcellus Gilmore Edson filed for a United States patent describing a …25
Bubble Wrap Appreciation dayObservanceOn a Monday in late January 2001, a package of microphones arrived at Spirit 95, a radio station in …25
Burns NightObservanceOn 21 July 1801, nine men sat down to dinner in a low, whitewashed cottage in Alloway, two miles south of Ayr. …25
Dydd Santes DwynwenObservanceOn a small tidal island off the south-western coast of Anglesey stand the weathered ruins of a church, beside …25
India National Voters DayObservanceOn 25 January 1950, one day before India formally became a republic, the Election Commission of India came …25
Irish Coffee DayFoodOn a filthy winter night in 1943, a transatlantic flying boat lumbered out of the airbase at Foynes, on the …25
Opposite DayObservanceA child is told to tidy a bedroom, plants both feet, grins, and announces that it is Opposite Day, so …26
Australia DayObservanceOn 26 January 1788, eleven ships of the First Fleet, having sailed from Portsmouth eight months earlier with …26
India Republic DayHistoryOn 24 January 1950, in the Constitution Hall in New Delhi, the 308 members of the Constituent Assembly filed …26
International Customs DayObservanceOn 26 January 1953, delegates from seventeen countries, most of them Western European, gathered in Brussels …27
Canada Family Literacy DayAwarenessA child whose parent reads aloud to them for fifteen minutes a day arrives at school having heard, over five …27
International Holocaust Remembrance DayHistoryOn the afternoon of 27 January 1945, soldiers of the Soviet Red Army reached the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau …27
US National Chocolate Cake DayFoodIn 1765, an Irish immigrant named John Hannon who had trained as a chocolate-maker in London met James Baker, …28
Data privacy dayObservanceOn 28 January 1981, in Strasbourg, a group of delegates from the Council of Europe put their signatures to a …28
Fun at Work DayFunIn 1996, a former university lecturer named Matt Weinstein, who ran a California company called Playfair, …28
National Kazoo DayAnimalsOn 9 January 1883, the United States Patent Office issued patent number 270,543 to an inventor named Warren …29
National Cornchip DayObservanceOn 10 July 1932, a small advertisement appeared in the San Antonio Express. A Oaxacan soccer coach named …29
National Puzzle DayCultureIn 1766, a London engraver and mapmaker named John Spilsbury glued a printed map of the world onto a sheet of …30
Martyrs DayCultureAt about 5.17 in the afternoon of 30 January 1948, Mohandas Gandhi was walking through the gardens of Birla …30
National Croissant DayFoodIn 1839, an Austrian artillery officer named August Zang opened a bakery at 92 rue de Richelieu in Paris and …31
International Street Childrens DayNatureIn 2011 a London-based network called the Consortium for Street Children launched a single, deliberately …31
National Hot Chocolate DayFoodLong before it became a fireside comfort, the chocolate drink was bitter, frothed, often spiced with chilli, … February
1
Baked Alaska dayFoodIn March 1867 the United States bought Alaska from Russia for around seven million dollars, and a good part of …1
Brazilian National Tomato DayFoodSomewhere around 500 BC, in the warm valleys of central Mexico, growers were already coaxing a small, …1
Car insurance dayObservanceOn 18 August 1925, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts passed the Compulsory Automobile Liability Security Act, …1
Serpent dayObservanceOn a gold death mask made for the boy-king Tutankhamun around 1323 BC, a cobra rears above the forehead, hood …1
World Hijab DayObservanceWhen Nazma Khan arrived in New York from Bangladesh at the age of eleven, she was the only girl wearing a …1
World Interfaith Harmony WeekReligionOn 23 September 2010, King Abdullah II of Jordan stood before the 65th session of the United Nations General …2
Candlemas DayReligionIn Jerusalem around the year 380, a Spanish pilgrim named Egeria wrote home describing a feast she had seen …2
Groundhog DayFunOn the morning of 2 February 1887, a small party of men in heavy coats trudged up a wooded rise outside the …2
Rheumatoid Arthritis Awareness DayCultureIn 1858 the English physician Alfred Baring Garrod gave a misunderstood disease a name that has stuck ever …2
US National Tater Tot DayObservanceIn 1953, on the dry, irrigated farmland near Ontario, Oregon, two brothers stood over a heap of potato slivers …3
Carrot cake dayFoodIn 1814, Antoine Beauvilliers, who had once cooked for Louis XVI and ran one of the first true restaurants in …3
Japanese SetsubunCultureThe Japanese chronicle Shoku Nihongi records that in the year 706, a plague having swept the country, the …4
Homemade soup dayFoodIn a cave in Jiangxi province, in southern China, archaeologists found cooking pots roughly 18,000 years old, …4
Sri Lanka Independence DayHistoryAt dawn on 4 February 1948, in the colonial capital of Colombo, the Union Jack came down and the lion banner …4
World Cancer DayHealthOn 4 February 2000, the President of France, Jacques Chirac, and the Director-General of UNESCO, Kōichirō …4
World Read Aloud DayCultureIt began with a question from a child. In a LitWorld reading club, a young member asked his teacher why there …5
Bubblegum dayObservanceIn 1928, a 23-year-old accountant at the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia was tinkering with gum …5
Weathermans dayNatureOn 7 January 1785, a Boston-born physician named John Jeffries climbed into a hydrogen balloon at Dover with …5
Working naked dayObservanceThe phrase comes from a book. Before it was a date on the internet’s sprawling calendar of unofficial …5
World Nutella DayFoodOn 5 February 2007, an Italian-American blogger named Sara Rosso published a post on her food blog declaring …6
International Day of Zero Tolerance to Female Genital MutilationHistoryOn 6 February 2003, Stella Obasanjo, the First Lady of Nigeria, stood before a conference in Addis Ababa and …6
National Chopsticks DayCultureIn the ruins of Yin, near Anyang in Henan province, archaeologists pulled six bronze sticks from the earth of …6
New Zealand Waitangi DayObservanceOn the afternoon of 6 February 1840, on a lawn in front of James Busby’s house at Waitangi in the Bay of …7
Ballet dayCultureIn 1581, in a hall of the French royal court, dancers performed the Ballet Comique de la Reine, a lavish …7
National Fettuccine Alfredo DayFoodIn 1908, in a small restaurant off the Piazza Rosa in Rome, a cook named Alfredo di Lelio watched his wife …8
International Safer Internet DayScienceIn 2004 a project funded under the European Union’s first Safer Internet Action Plan, going by the name …9
US National Pizza DayFoodIn June 1889, in a kitchen on the Salita Sant’Anna di Palazzo in Naples, a pizzaiolo named Raffaele …10
Plimsoll dayObservanceOn 10 February 1824 a child was born in Bristol who would, half a century later, stand in the House of Commons …10
Umbrella dayObservanceIn 1756, the London merchant and philanthropist Jonas Hanway began walking the streets of the capital holding …11
International Day of Women and Girls in ScienceAwarenessIn 1903 a Polish-born physicist named Maria Sklodowska Curie shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with her …11
Make a friend dayObservanceIn January 2018, the British government did something no government had done before: it appointed a Minister …11
White shirt dayObservanceAt eleven years after the event, in 1948, a former striker named Bert Christensen had an idea about a shirt. …12
Darwin DayScienceOn 12 February 1809, in a tall brick house called The Mount overlooking the River Severn in Shrewsbury, two …12
International Day of Womens HealthHistoryIn May 1987, activists gathered in Costa Rica for the fourth International Women’s Health Meeting and …12
Red Hand DayObservanceOn 12 February 2002, a piece of international law that had taken years to negotiate finally came into force: …12
Sexual and Reproductive Health Awareness DayHealthIn Canada, the second week of February has for years been set aside by the Public Health Agency of Canada as …13
Galentine's DayFunOn 11 February 2010, NBC broadcast the sixteenth episode of the second season of Parks and Recreation, in …13
Hug DayFunThe night before Valentine’s Day, much of India and a good slice of the rest of the world stops to do …13
National Tortellini DayFoodOn 7 December 1974 a recipe was lodged with a notary in Bologna, signed by the city’s mayor Renato …13
Unesco World Radio DayCultureOn 20 September 2010, the Spanish Radio Academy sent a request to its government that would eventually fix a …13
World Radio DayCultureOn 13 February 1946, the newly formed United Nations switched on its own radio service and broadcast its first …14
Canada Congenital Heart Defect Awareness DayHealthRoughly one Canadian baby in every hundred is born with a heart that did not form quite as the textbook says …14
Valentines DayReligionIn 1415, while held in the Tower of London after his capture at Agincourt, Charles, Duke of Orléans, wrote to …15
International Childhood Cancer DayHealthIn 1994 a group of parents who had each watched a child face cancer did something quietly radical: they …15
US National I Want Butterscotch DayObservanceIn 1817, a confectioner named Samuel Parkinson set up shop on the High Street of Doncaster, a market town in …16
Almond dayFoodThe almond you ate this morning is, in evolutionary terms, a domesticated mistake — and a lucky one. Its wild …16
Innovation DayObservanceIn 1948, a manager at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, better known as 3M, made an unusual …17
Digital learning dayObservanceOn 1 February 2012, teachers in thirty-nine American states switched on whatever screens their schools could …17
Random act of kindness dayObservanceSometime in 1982, in a restaurant in Sausalito, California, a writer named Anne Herbert wrote a sentence on a …18
Battery dayObservanceIn the spring of 1800, Alessandro Volta wrote to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society in London, …18
Drink wine dayFoodIn 2007, archaeologists working in the Areni-1 cave in the Vayots Dzor province of Armenia uncovered something …19
Chokolate mint dayObservanceIn 1962, a confectioner named Brian Sollitt stood in a kitchen at the Rowntree factory in York, trying to coax …20
Cherry pie dayFoodIn 1806, a travelling bookseller and part-time clergyman named Mason Locke Weems slipped a small story into …20
Handcuff dayObservanceIn 1862, in the United States, an inventor named W. V. Adams filed a patent that quietly changed policing …20
World Day of Social JusticeAwarenessOn 26 November 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 62/10 and proclaimed 20 February …21
Bangladesh Language Martyrs DayCultureOn 21 February 1952, in the streets around Dhaka University, police opened fire on students who had gathered …21
Global Information Governance DayObservanceIn 2012, three men with backgrounds in records management and analytics decided that one of the least …21
International Mother Language DayCultureOn 21 February 1952, students from the University of Dhaka defied a ban on public gatherings and marched to …21
Unesco International Mother Language DayCultureOn the afternoon of 21 February 1952, police opened fire on a crowd of students near the medical college in …22
International Scouts DayObservanceOn the morning of 1 August 1907, twenty boys stepped off a boat onto Brownsea Island, a wooded lump of land in …22
Thinking DayObservanceIn 1926, in a wooded camp on the Hudson River north of New York City, delegates to the fourth World Conference …22
US National Margarita DayFoodIn 1945, an advertisement for Jose Cuervo ran across the United States with the tagline “Margarita: …22
World Thinking DayObservanceIn 1926, at the fourth World Conference of the Girl Guide and Girl Scout movement, held at Camp Edith Macy in …23
US National Banana Bread DayFoodIn 1933, a Minnesota home economist named Mary Ellis Ames included a recipe for banana bread in the pages of …24
Tortilla Chip DayObservanceIn a tortilla factory in southwest Los Angeles in the 1940s, an automated press kept spitting out tortillas …25
Clam Chowder dayObservanceIn chapter fifteen of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville pauses the hunt for a meal. Ishmael and Queequeg arrive cold …26
Pistachio DayObservanceIn the highlands of what is now north-eastern Iran, archaeologists have found traces of pistachio gathering …26
Tell a fairy tale dayObservanceSometime around 7 BCE, the Greek geographer Strabo wrote down a story about a slave girl named Rhodopis. An …27
Anosmia Awareness DayHealthDaniel Schein was in the fifth grade when he was told he could not smell, and like most who grow up with it he …27
National Strawberry DayFoodIn 1714 a French military engineer named Amédée-François Frézier stepped off a ship at Marseille carrying five …28
India National Science DayScienceOn 28 February 1928, in a modest laboratory of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science in …28
Rare Disease DayHealthThe first Rare Disease Day was held on 29 February 2008 — and the choice of the rarest date on the calendar, …29
Leap DayFunOn Thursday 4 October 1582, the people living in Rome, Madrid and Lisbon went to bed and woke up the next …29
US National Frog Legs DayAnimalsIn 2013, archaeologists sifting through ancient food remains at a site near Stonehenge in Wiltshire found a … March
1
Pig DayAnimalsIn 1972 two American sisters decided that the pig had been badly served by its reputation and set out to do …1
Saint Davids DayReligionSometime around the year 589, in a remote valley on the Pembrokeshire coast, a Welsh bishop is said to have …1
Self-injury Awareness DayAwarenessThe orange ribbon, the message written in biro along a forearm, the small butterfly drawn on a wrist: the …1
US National Peanut Butter Lovers DayFoodThere is a quiet absurdity in the fact that the United States observes a National Peanut Butter Day on 24 …1
US Sandwich DayFoodOn 23 March 1965, an hour and a half into the Gemini III mission, pilot John Young reached into a pocket of …1
Zero Discrimination DayObservanceOn 27 February 2014, in Beijing, the head of the UN’s AIDS agency stood up to launch a day that did not …2
Texas Independence DayHistoryOn the morning of 2 March 1836, in an unfinished building at Washington-on-the-Brazos with no glass in the …2
US National Banana Creme Pie DayFoodIn a survey conducted with the United States armed forces in 1951, banana cream pie was voted the favourite …3
Japanese Doll FestivalCultureIn 1629, when the young Empress Meishō ascended the throne of Japan, her mother arranged a set of dolls to …3
US National Canadian Bacon DayFoodIn 1854, a young pork butcher named William Davies left England and set up a stall in Toronto’s St …3
World Wildlife DayAnimalsOn 3 March 1973, representatives of eighty governments meeting in Washington, D.C. signed the Convention on …4
Dress in blue dayObservanceIn 2006, an entire school in Texas swapped its plaid uniforms for blue jeans and blue shirts, and hundreds of …4
National Pound Cake DayFoodIn 1747 a London writer named Hannah Glasse published The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, a book aimed …5
US National Cheese Doodle DayFoodSometime in the 1950s, in a Bronx food company that had started life making ice-cream cones, a Marine Corps …6
Namesake dayObservanceAmong Ashkenazi Jewish families there is a long-standing rule that you name a child only after a relative who …6
National Frozen Food DayFoodSometime between 1912 and 1915, an American naturalist named Clarence Birdseye stood on the frozen flats of …6
National Oreo DayFoodOn 6 March 1912 a wholesale order of a new sandwich biscuit left the National Biscuit Company’s factory …7
National Cereal DayFoodIn 1894, in the kitchens of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, a batch of boiled wheat dough was left …7
US National Crown Roast of Pork DayObservanceStand a rack of pork ribs on end, curve it into a ring, tie the two ends together, and you have done something …8
International Womens DayAwarenessIn August 1910, at a conference of socialist women in Copenhagen, a German activist named Clara Zetkin stood …8
US National Peanut Cluster DayFoodThe peanut cluster is the sweet that gave the world the verb “to glob”: a rough, unrepentant mound …9
US National Crabmeat DayObservanceThe blue crab that dominates the Chesapeake Bay carries a scientific name that is essentially a compliment: …9
US National Meatball DayFoodIn the Roman cookbook attributed to Marcus Gavius Apicius, De Re Coquinaria, compiled around the late 4th or …10
National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness DayHealthIn 2006, the US Department of Health and Human Services’ Office on Women’s Health set aside 10 …10
US National Blueberry Popover DayFoodThe oldest known written use of the word “popover” appears in a letter dated 1850 from a writer …11
US Johnny Appleseed DayFoodWhen John Chapman died near Fort Wayne, Indiana, in March 1845, the local newspaper, the Fort Wayne Sentinel, …11
US Oatmeal Nut Waffles DayFoodIn 1869 an American named Cornelius Swartwout patented a stove-top waffle iron with a handle and a hinge that …12
US National Baked Scallops DayFoodMedieval pilgrims walking to Santiago de Compostela, the Spanish cathedral city believed to hold the remains …12
World Kidney DayHealthThe idea took shape in the spring of 2003, when the nephrologist Joel Kopple argued that chronic kidney …13
US National Coconut Torte DayFoodThe oldest cake named after a place is the Linzertorte, and the earliest known recipe for it, found in 2005 by …14
National Potato Chip DayFoodIn the summer of 1853, at a lakeside resort near Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, a cook named George …14
Pi DayScienceAt 1:59 in the afternoon on 14 March 1988, a physicist named Larry Shaw led a procession of museum staff …14
White DayObservanceIn 1977, a reader wrote to a Japanese women’s magazine with a complaint that turned into a national …15
World Consumer Rights DayAwarenessOn 15 March 1962, President John F. Kennedy sent a Special Message on Protecting the Consumer Interest to the …16
Freedom of information dayAwarenessJames Madison was born on 16 March 1751 at Port Conway, Virginia, and grew into the small, soft-spoken, …16
Lips apreciation dayObservanceIn the royal tombs of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur, archaeologists led by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s …17
Brazilian National Honey DayFoodIn October 1957, at an agricultural research station near Rio Claro in the state of São Paulo, a visiting …17
Saint Patricks DayReligionIn 1962, a crew of Chicago plumbers tipped a hundred pounds of dye into the river that runs through the …17
St. Patrick's DayCulturePatrick opens his own memoir with a confession of failure: “I, Patrick, a sinner, the most …18
Biodiesel dayObservanceAt the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, visitors filed past a small engine built by the Otto company and …19
Poultry dayObservanceIn the dry season of central Thailand, perhaps three and a half thousand years ago, a wild bird with a …20
International Day of HappinessHistoryIn 1972, the young King of Bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, made a remark that would echo far beyond his small …20
World Sparrow DayObservanceIn the city of Nashik, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, a young conservationist named Mohammed Dilawar …21
International Day for the Elimination of Racial DiscriminationHistoryOn the morning of 21 March 1960, several thousand people gathered outside the police station in Sharpeville, a …21
International Day of ForestsHistoryThe idea of giving forests a day of their own is older than the day itself. As far back as November 1971, at …21
International Day of NowruzHistoryOn a low table somewhere in Tehran, Tashkent or a flat in north London, seven things are laid out with care: …21
Unesco World Poetry DayCultureIn the autumn of 1999, the delegates of UNESCO’s thirtieth General Conference, meeting in Paris, voted …21
World Down Syndrome DayObservanceThe date is a piece of quiet wit. Written in the day-month form that most of the world uses, 21 March becomes …21
World Wood DayObservanceIn March 2013, woodcarvers, luthiers, foresters and sculptors gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, for the …22
US National Corndog DayAnimalsIn 1992, in the basement of a house in Corvallis, Oregon, two students named Brady Sahnow and Henry Otley …22
World Water DayNatureIn June 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development convened in Rio de Janeiro, the …23
US National Chips and Dip DayObservanceSometime in 1954, an unnamed home cook in California stirred a packet of Lipton’s dehydrated onion soup …23
World Meteorological DayScienceIn August 1872, more than fifty meteorologists gathered in Leipzig at the urging of Christophorus Buys Ballot, …24
International Day for the Right to the Truth concerning Gross HumanHistoryOn 24 March 1980, Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero was standing at the altar of a small chapel in San Salvador, …24
National Cheesesteak DayFoodIn 1930, at a hot-dog cart standing where 9th Street meets Wharton Street and Passyunk Avenue in South …24
World Tuberculosis DayHealthOn the evening of 24 March 1882, a German country doctor turned bacteriologist named Robert Koch stood before …25
EU Talent DayReligionThe date belongs to a composer. On 25 March 1881, Béla Bartók was born in Nagyszentmiklós, then in Hungary and …25
International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and theHistoryStand on the Visitors’ Plaza of the United Nations headquarters in New York and you will find a …25
International Day of Solidarity with Detained and Missing Staff MembersHistoryOn 25 March 1985, armed men seized a 64-year-old British journalist on the streets of Beirut. Alec Collett was …25
Swedish National Waffle DayFoodSweden’s Waffle Day exists because of a slip of the tongue. The 25th of March is the Feast of the …26
Bangladesh Independence DayHistoryIn the small hours of 26 March 1971, as the Pakistani army’s tanks moved through the streets of Dhaka …26
Brazilian National Cocoa DayObservanceBy 1986, Bahia was shipping almost 400,000 tonnes of cocoa a year, and cacao exports alone made up roughly …26
National Spinach DayFoodOf all the foods to be rescued from obscurity by a cartoon, spinach has the strangest case. A leaf that had …26
Purple DayObservanceIn 2008, a nine-year-old girl in Nova Scotia asked her mother a deceptively simple question: why wasn’t …26
Purple Day for EpilepsyHealthRoughly one in every hundred people will be living with epilepsy at any given time, which means that almost …27
National Cocktail DayFoodOn 13 May 1806, a reader of The Balance and Columbian Repository, a newspaper published in Hudson, New York, …27
National Spanish Paella DayFoodIn October 2016 the British chef Jamie Oliver posted a photograph of his dinner and detonated an international …27
US International Whiskey DayFoodOn 27 March 2008, at a whisky festival in the northern Netherlands, a group of writers raised a glass to a …28
Earth Hour DayNatureAt 7.30 on the evening of Saturday 31 March 2007, the floodlights on the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney …28
Something on a stick dayObservancePicture an early human crouched beside a fire, having just made a small but decisive discovery: jam the meat …29
Smoke and mirrors dayObservanceIn the summer of 1975, as the dust of Watergate was still settling, the American journalist Jimmy Breslin …30
Pencil dayObservanceOn 30 March 1858, a Philadelphia stationer named Hymen Lipman was granted United States patent number 19,783 …30
World Arabic Coffee DayCultureIn a majlis in the Gulf, the youngest person present often pours the coffee. They hold the long-spouted brass …31
US National Clams on the Half Shell DayObservanceAlong the tidal mudflats of the Damariscotta River in Maine sit shell heaps so vast that nineteenth-century … Advertisement
April
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April Fools' DayFunOn the evening of 1 April 1957, around eight million Britons watched the respected BBC current-affairs …1
National Sourdough Bread DayFoodIn 1849, a young baker named Isidore Boudin arrived in San Francisco from Burgundy and noticed that the …2
US National Peanut Butter and Jelly DayFoodThe first known recipe for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich appeared in 1901, in the Boston Cooking School …2
World Autism Awareness DayHealthOn 18 December 2007 the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 62/139, designating 2 April as …3
Find a rainbow dayNatureIn 1637, working alone with a glass globe of water held up to the sun, René Descartes finally explained why a …3
National Chocolate Mousse DayFoodIn 1750, a French author writing under the name Menon published La Science du Maître d’Hôtel Confiseur, …4
International Carrot DayFoodIn 2003 a small group of carrot enthusiasts in Sweden decided that the most ubiquitous vegetable in the …4
International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine ActionHistoryIn January 1997 Diana, Princess of Wales, walked in a flak jacket and visor down a cleared lane through a …4
National Tweed DayObservanceThe most famous cloth in Scotland is named after a mistake. Sometime in the 1830s a London merchant received a …5
US National Caramel DayFoodIn 1977, a chocolatier named Henri Le Roux opened a shop in Quiberon, on the Brittany coast, and began making …6
International Day of Sport for Development and PeaceHistoryOn 6 April 1896, in a restored marble stadium in Athens, the first Olympic Games of the modern era opened …6
National Carbonara DayFoodOn 22 September 1944, in the newly liberated seaside town of Riccione, a young Italian cook named Renato …7
International Day of Reflection on the Genocide in RwandaHistoryOn the evening of 6 April 1994, a small jet carrying the president of Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, was shot …7
National Beer DayFoodAt one minute past midnight on 7 April 1933, the doors of American breweries opened for the first time in over …7
US National Beer DayFoodOn the evening of 6 April 1933, crowds gathered outside breweries in Milwaukee, St Louis and New York, waiting …7
WHO World Health DayHealthThe World Health Organization’s constitution was signed by 61 states in New York on 22 July 1946, but it …8
International Romani DayObservanceBetween 7 and 12 April 1971, twenty-three delegates from ten countries gathered in a hall at Orpington, on the …9
Cherish an Antique DayObservanceWhen the United States Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930, it needed a legal line between an …9
Name Yourself DayObservanceThomas and Ruth Roy have invented dozens of holidays. Working under the banner of Wellcat Holidays in …9
World IoT DayCultureIn 2010, a Belgian-based think tank called the IoT Council, founded the previous year in Brussels by the …10
Encourage a Young Writer DayObservanceThe Brontë children produced miniature handmade books, stitched and written in a script so tiny it almost …10
Farm Animals DayAnimalsIn 2005, Colleen Paige, an American animal rescuer and pet lifestyle author, added another date to a calendar …10
Siblings DayObservanceClaudia Evart lost her sister Lisette in a car accident when the two were teenagers, and fourteen years later …11
International Louie Louie DayObservanceIn 1959, needing cash to pay for his wedding, the Los Angeles singer Richard Berry sold the rights to a song …11
National Pet DayAnimalsColleen Paige adopted her first shelter dog, a Sheltie, when she was ten years old, and the experience set the …11
US National Cheese Fondue DayFoodThe image of fondue as an ancient Alpine peasant tradition is almost entirely the work of a cheese cartel in …12
Cosmonautics DayObservanceAt 9:07 in the morning, Moscow time, on 12 April 1961, a twenty-seven-year-old Soviet Air Force lieutenant …12
International Day of Human Space FlightHistoryAt 9:07 on the morning of 12 April 1961, a Vostok-K rocket lifted off from the steppe of Baikonur in Soviet …12
US National Grilled Cheese Sandwich DayFoodThe phrase “grilled cheese” did not appear in American print until the 1960s. For the decades …13
National Cheddar Fries DayFoodIn 1978, a new bar called Snuffer’s opened on Lower Greenville Avenue in Dallas, Texas, and a group of …13
National Peach Cobbler DayFoodThe first published recipe for peach cobbler appeared in Lettice Bryan’s The Kentucky Housewife in 1839, …13
Thai SongkranCultureIn December 2023, in the unlikely setting of Kasane, a town on the edge of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, a …13
Undiagnosed Childrens Awareness DayAwarenessFor a family whose child has spent years in and out of clinics with no name for what is wrong, the most …14
Black DayObservanceOn 14 April, while couples elsewhere are still basking in the afterglow of February’s flowers and …14
Brazilian Coffee DayFoodIn 1727, a Portuguese officer named Francisco de Melo Palheta crossed into French Guiana on what was …14
National Pecan DayFoodIn the winter of 1846, on the Oak Alley plantation in Louisiana, an enslaved gardener known only by the name …14
Pohela BoishakhObservanceIn 1584, the Mughal emperor Akbar grew frustrated with a calendar that refused to keep step with the harvest. …15
Day of DialogueObservanceIn the spring of 2005, more than a thousand American students at some three hundred and fifty schools wore …15
Day of SilenceObservanceIn 1996, an eighteen-year-old University of Virginia student named Maria Pulzetti was taking a class on the …15
World Art DayCultureIn April 2011, delegates from the International Association of Art gathered in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the …16
Foursquare DayObservanceIn early 2010, a Tampa Bay optometrist named Nate Bonilla-Warford posted an idea to a Foursquare community …17
Italian National Espresso DayObservanceOn 16 May 1884, at the General Exposition in Turin, a businessman named Angelo Moriondo unveiled a contraption …17
US National Cheeseball DayFoodThe first written cheese ball recipe as Americans now recognise it appeared in 1944, in a cookbook called Food …17
World Hemophilia DayObservanceFrank Schnabel was born on 17 April 1942, lived with haemophilia A, and in 1963 founded the World Federation …18
Animal Crackers DayAnimalsIn 1902 the National Biscuit Company, the firm we now know as Nabisco, sold a small box of biscuits with a …18
Columnists DayObservanceOn 18 April 1945, on the small island of Ie Shima off Okinawa, a Japanese machine-gun opened up on a jeep …18
Lineman DayObservanceOn the night of 10 July 1896, in a thunderstorm over Washington, D.C., a forty-three-year-old man climbed a …19
Bicycle DayObservanceAt twenty past four on the afternoon of 19 April 1943, in a laboratory in wartime Basel, a Swiss chemist named …19
Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia Action DayObservanceThe date of 19 April was chosen for an unusually pointed reason: it is the anniversary of a legal victory. For …19
US National Garlic DayFoodWhen Howard Carter’s team opened Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, among the gold and the calcified …19
US National Rice Ball DayFoodIn November 1987, archaeologists digging at the Sugitani Chanobatake site in what is now Nakanoto, Ishikawa …20
Lima Bean Respect DayObservanceArchaeologists digging in the dry coastal valleys of Peru have pulled lima beans out of the ground that are …20
Look Alike DayObservanceSome time in the 1980s, a television reporter named Jack Etzel was wandering downtown Pittsburgh with his …20
Pineapple Upside Down Cake DayFoodIn 1925 the Hawaiian Pineapple Company, the firm run by James Dole that would eventually become known simply …21
Chocolate Covered Cashews DayFoodSometime between 1560 and 1565, Portuguese colonists carried seeds of a curved, kidney-shaped nut from the …21
Kindergarten DayCultureIn 1837, in the small Thuringian spa town of Bad Blankenburg, a fifty-five-year-old German educator opened an …22
Earth DayNatureOn 22 April 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans, roughly a tenth of the country’s population, took …23
English Language DayCultureThe date is a deliberate borrowing. The 23rd of April is traditionally observed as both the birthday and the …23
German Beer DayFoodOn 23 April 1516, at a meeting of the Bavarian estates in the town of Ingolstadt, Duke Wilhelm IV and his …23
National Picnic DayFunThe word “picnic” first surfaces in print in 1649, in an anonymous French broadside of burlesque …23
St Georges DayObservanceThe man England celebrates on 23 April was, almost certainly, never in England. He spoke Greek, soldiered in …23
World Book and Copyright DayCultureIn Barcelona on 23 April, the pavements vanish under trestle tables of books and buckets of red roses, and …24
Brazilian National Mate DayObservanceIn 1819, a French naturalist named Augustin Saint-Hilaire, travelling through South America, gave a botanical …24
US National Pigs in a Blanket DayAnimalsIn 1957, the fictional American kitchen authority Betty Crocker published Cooking for Boys and Girls, and …25
ANZAC DayHistoryBefore dawn on 25 April 1915, boats carrying Australian and New Zealand soldiers grounded on a narrow beach …25
Parental Alienation Awareness DayAwarenessIn 2005, a woman in Oakville, Ontario, named Sarvy Emo watched a close friend struggle to keep contact with …25
US National Zucchini Bread DayFoodAsk any gardener why zucchini bread exists and they will answer before you finish the question: because a …25
WHO World Malaria DayHealthIn May 2007, at the 60th session of the World Health Assembly in Geneva, delegates passed resolution WHA60.18 …25
World Penguin DayAnimalsAt McMurdo Station, the American research base on Ross Island in Antarctica, the scientists who wintered over …26
US National Pretzel DayFoodIn 1861, in the small Pennsylvania Dutch town of Lititz, a baker named Julius Sturgis opened what is generally …26
World Intellectual Property DayObservanceOn 26 April 1970, the Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization came into force, …27
US National Prime Rib DayObservanceThere is a small linguistic trick hiding inside the most reassuringly expensive item on an American steakhouse …28
World Day for Safety and Health at WorkHealthOn 28 April 1996, Canadian and American trade unionists laid wreaths for colleagues killed at work, choosing a …29
Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical WarfareHistoryIn the early evening of 22 April 1915, near the Belgian town of Ypres, French and Canadian soldiers watched a …29
Japanese Showa DayCultureOn 25 December 1926, a 25-year-old prince named Hirohito ascended the Chrysanthemum Throne, and the calendar …29
US National Shrimp Scampi DayScienceThe name is a small joke that nobody set out to make. “Scampi” is the Italian plural of scampo, …30
International Jazz DayCultureAt sunrise on 30 April 2012, a crowd gathered in Congo Square in New Orleans, the patch of ground where … May
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International Workers DayAwarenessOn the evening of 4 May 1886, a labour rally was winding down in the rain in Haymarket Square, Chicago. As …1
May DayObservanceOn the evening of 4 May 1886, a labour rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago was breaking up in light rain when …3
World Press Freedom DayAwarenessOn 3 May 1991, a room of African newspaper journalists in Windhoek, the capital of newly independent Namibia, …4
Greenery DayObservanceWhen Emperor Hirohito died on 7 January 1989, the Japanese government faced an oddly delicate calendar …4
Remembrance of the DeadHistoryAt eight o’clock on the evening of 4 May, trams stop in the middle of the street, conversations break …4
Star Wars DayHistoryOn 4 May 1979, the day after Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister, her …4
US National Candied Orange Peel DayFoodWhen sixteenth-century European hosts wanted to send their guests home with something special, they sometimes …5
Cinco de MayoCultureAround noon on 5 May 1862, three columns of French infantry began climbing the muddy slope toward two hilltop …5
International Midwives DayObservanceThe first International Day of the Midwife, on 5 May 1991, carried a slogan that now reads as both hopeful and …5
Japanese Children's DayCultureDrive through almost any Japanese town in late April or early May and you will see them long before you reach …5
US National Hoagie DayObservanceSoutheast of central Philadelphia, on a marshy stretch of the Delaware River that locals called Hog Island …6
International No Diet DayObservanceThe first International No Diet Day was supposed to happen in Hyde Park. In 1992, the British activist Mary …7
World Password DayCultureIn 2005, the security researcher Mark Burnett published a book called Perfect Passwords in which he made a …8
National Coconut Cream Pie DayFoodIn 1895 a Philadelphia flour miller named Franklin Baker accepted an unusual settlement for a debt he was …8
National Empanada DayFoodCarved into the Pórtico de la Gloria, the great Romanesque doorway of the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela …8
Victory in Europe DayHistoryAt three o’clock on the afternoon of 8 May 1945, Winston Churchill’s voice came over the wireless …11
Military Spouse Appreciation DayObservanceOn 17 April 1984, President Ronald Reagan signed Proclamation 5184, designating 23 May that year as Military …11
US National Eat What You Want DayObservanceIn a farmhouse in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, a husband-and-wife team named Thomas and Ruth Roy decided some years …12
International Nurses DayHealthOn the night of 12 May 1820, in the Italian city that gave her her name, Florence Nightingale was born into a …13
International Hummus DayObservanceIn 2012, an eighteen-year-old named Ben Lang noticed that Nutella had its own day. World Nutella Day had …13
World Cocktail DayFoodOn 13 May 1806, a reader of a small newspaper in Hudson, New York, wrote in to ask what exactly the editor had …15
International Day of FamiliesHistoryIn 1989 the United Nations General Assembly, through resolution 44/82, declared that 1994 would be the …16
International Day of LightCultureOn 16 May 1960, in a laboratory at the Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, California, a 32-year-old …16
National Coquilles St. Jacques DayFoodWalk any of the medieval routes that converge on the Spanish city of Santiago de Compostela and you will see …16
World Whisky DayFoodIn 2012, a 21-year-old student named Blair Bowman was on a year abroad in Barcelona, studying Hispanic Studies …17
International Day Against Homophobia and TransphobiaHistoryOn 17 May 1990, the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the International Classification of …17
Norwegian Constitution DayCultureAt Eidsvoll Manor, a country house north of what was then Christiania, 112 men gathered in the spring of 1814 …17
US National Walnut DayFoodIn June 1949 the Walnut Marketing Board, working from Folsom, California, declared the first National Walnut …17
World Telecommunication and Information Society DayScienceOn 17 May 1865, in Paris, representatives of twenty European states signed the first International Telegraph …18
International Museum DayCultureIn May 1977, delegates of the International Council of Museums gathered for their general assembly in Moscow …20
World Bee DayNatureOn 20 May 1734, in the hamlet of Breznica in what is now Slovenia, a child named Anton Janša was born into a …21
World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and DevelopmentObservanceIn November 2001, two months after the September 11 attacks, the member states of UNESCO meeting in Paris …22
International Day for Biological DiversityHistoryOn 22 May 1992, in a conference room in Nairobi, delegates finalised the text of a treaty that ran to …23
International Day to End Obstetric FistulaHistoryIn 1959, an Australian obstetrician named Catherine Hamlin answered an advertisement in The Lancet. The …23
US National Taffy DayObservanceIn 1883 a heavy storm drove the sea over the Atlantic City boardwalk and flooded a young confectioner’s …23
World Turtle DayAnimalsIn 1990, a married couple in Malibu, California, Susan Tellem and Marshall Thompson, founded American Tortoise …24
Commonwealth DayObservanceIn 1898, in an Ontario schoolroom, a teacher named Clementina Trenholme had her pupils mark the last school …24
US National Escargot DayObservanceAround 49 BC, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder records, a man named Quintus Fulvius Lippinus laid out …25
Geek Pride DayObservanceOn 25 May 2006, roughly 300 people gathered in the Plaza de Callao in central Madrid and arranged themselves …25
International Missing Childrens DayAwarenessOn the morning of 25 May 1979, a six-year-old boy named Etan Patz walked the short distance towards his school …25
Towel DayObservanceOn 14 May 2001, three days after Douglas Adams died of a heart attack in Santa Barbara at the age of …25
US National Wine DayFoodIn 2017, a team of archaeologists announced that pottery fragments excavated at Gadachrili Gora, a Neolithic …28
Australian National Burger DayFoodOrder a burger “with the lot” at an old-fashioned Australian takeaway and you will be handed …28
Menstrual Hygiene DayHealthIn May 2013 a small Berlin-based charity ran a twenty-eight-day social media campaign with an unwieldy, …28
US National Brisket DayObservanceThe same cut of beef sits at the heart of two of America’s most cherished food traditions, and the …28
US National Burger DayFoodAt least four American towns insist they invented the hamburger, and none of them can prove it. New Haven, …29
International Day of UN PeacekeepersHistoryOn 29 May 1948, a handful of unarmed military observers reported for duty in the Middle East to watch over a …29
National Biscuit DayFoodIn 1998, a physicist named Len Fisher published a serious piece of research, funded by the biscuit maker …29
World Digestive Health DayHealthOn 29 May 1958, on the closing day of the First World Congress of Gastroenterology in Washington, a gathering …31
WHO World No Tobacco DayObservanceThe date now fixed at 31 May was not the first one chosen. In 1987 the World Health Assembly passed resolution … June
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Global Day of ParentsObservanceOn 17 September 2012, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 66/292 and, in a few sober …1
World Milk DayFoodSomewhere in central Europe or the steppe roughly seven thousand years ago, a genetic accident took hold that …2
US National Rocky Road DayObservanceIn March 1929, in a creamery on Grand Avenue in Oakland, California, William Dreyer reached for his …2
US National Rotisserie Chicken DayObservanceNapoleon Bonaparte, by several accounts, could not get enough of spit-roasted fowl, and the kitchens of his …3
US National Chocolate Macaroon DayFoodIn 827, Arab troops from Tunisia captured Sicily and, among the spoils of conquest and exchange, brought a …3
US National Egg DayFoodThe egg in your fridge has a wilder ancestry than its plain white shell suggests. It comes from a bird …3
World Bicycle DayCultureThe campaign that gave the bicycle its own day on the United Nations calendar began in a sociology classroom. …4
Tailors DayObservanceAt the western end of a short London street between Regent Street and Burlington Gardens, a tailoring firm …4
US National Cheese DayFoodIn a clay pot dug from a site in Poland’s Kuyavia region, archaeologists found fatty residues that …4
US National Cognac DayObservanceIn the early 1620s, Dutch merchants sailing into the ports of the Charente, on France’s Atlantic coast, …5
Danish Constitution DayCultureOn 5 June 1849, King Frederik VII of Denmark put his signature to a document that stripped his own crown of …5
US National Donut/Doughnut DayFoodIn the autumn of 1917, two Salvation Army officers stationed near the front line in Montiers-sur-Saulx, …5
US National Gingerbread DayFoodAt the Tudor court of Elizabeth I, who reigned over England from 1558 to 1603, the queen had gingerbread baked …5
US National Moonshine DayNatureIn the summer of 1794, several thousand armed farmers in western Pennsylvania were prepared to fight the …5
World Environment DayNatureIn June 1972, delegates from 113 nations gathered in Stockholm for the United Nations Conference on the Human …6
D-DayHistoryAt 04:00 on 5 June 1944, in a Nissen hut at Southwick House near Portsmouth, a meteorologist named Group …6
Russian Language Day at the UNCultureOn 6 June 1799, in Moscow, a child was born into the Russian nobility who would do more to shape his …6
US National Applesauce Cake DayFoodAround 1625, an eccentric Anglican clergyman named William Blaxton planted the first cultivated apple orchard …7
VCR DayObservanceOn 14 April 1956, at a broadcasters’ convention in Chicago, the Californian engineering firm Ampex …8
National Best Friends DayFunThink of the person you would call first with good news, before family, before a partner, before anyone …8
World Oceans DayNatureThe idea of a day for the oceans was tabled in 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, by two Canadian …9
Beef jerky dayObservanceWhen Spanish chroniclers climbed into the Andes in the 1530s, they found Inca storehouses — the qollqa — …10
Ball Point Pen DayObservanceOn 10 June 1943, in Buenos Aires, a Hungarian émigré named László Bíró registered an Argentine patent for a …10
US National Iced Tea DayFoodIn the summer of 1904, on the sweltering fairgrounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis, a …11
Gin dayFoodIn 2009, a gin lover named Neil Houston gathered a handful of friends in a back garden in Birmingham to drink …11
US National Corn on the cob dayObservanceIn 1779, members of the Iroquois grew a sweet, eight-rowed, red-cobbed corn that European settlers recorded …12
US National Peanut Butter Cookie DayFoodIn 1916 George Washington Carver published a slim pamphlet from the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama with the …12
World Day Against Child LabourAwarenessOn 12 June 2002 the International Labour Organization marked the first World Day Against Child Labour, and it …13
International Albinism Awareness DayAwarenessIn June 2015, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed a Nigerian lawyer named Ikponwosa Ero to a …13
Sewing Machine DayObservanceElias Howe spent the early 1840s watching his wife take in piecework sewing to keep the household afloat in …13
World Gin DayFoodIn June 2009, a gin enthusiast named Neil Houston invited a handful of friends into his garden in Birmingham …14
Bourbon DayObservanceOn 4 May 1964, a concurrent resolution of the United States Congress declared bourbon “a distinctive …14
World Blood Donor DayHealthOn 14 June 1868 a boy was born in Vienna who would, by 1901, work out why one person’s blood clumps and …15
Magna Carta DayCultureOn 15 June 1215, in a water-meadow called Runnymede on the south bank of the Thames between Windsor Castle and …15
US National Lobster DayFoodThere was a time in colonial New England when serving lobster too often was considered something close to …15
World Elder Abuse Awareness DayAwarenessOn 15 June 2006, a small ceremony at the United Nations headquarters in New York launched something the …16
Fresh Veggies DayFoodIn 1893 the Supreme Court of the United States sat down to decide what a tomato is. The case, Nix v. Hedden, …16
International Day of the African ChildObservanceOn the morning of 16 June 1976, a column of perhaps ten thousand pupils set out through the dusty streets of …16
US National Fudge DayObservanceIn 1886 a student in Baltimore paid forty cents a pound for a box of soft, chocolate-rich sweets unlike …17
Icelandic National DayCultureOn 17 June 1944, some twenty-five thousand people gathered on the rain-soaked plain of Þingvellir, in a …17
US National Eat Your Vegetables DayObservanceFew sentences are as freighted with childhood memory as “eat your vegetables.” It is the standoff …17
World Day to Combat Desertification and DroughtObservanceIn Paris on 17 June 1994, an Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee adopted the United Nations Convention to …18
Autistic Pride DayObservanceThe date was chosen almost by accident. When the campaigning group Aspies For Freedom marked the first …19
JuneteenthHistoryOn 19 June 1865, Major General Gordon Granger stepped ashore at Galveston, Texas, at the head of some 2,000 …19
Martini DayFoodIn 1887, the third edition of Jerry Thomas’s The Bar-Tender’s Guide printed a recipe for a …19
Swedish MidsommarCulturePicture a meadow somewhere in central Sweden a little before midnight in late June, where a tall pole wrapped …19
Thesis dayObservanceOn 31 October 1517, an Augustinian friar and theology professor named Martin Luther produced ninety-five …20
US National Ice Cream Soda DayFoodRobert M. Green was so certain he had invented the ice cream soda that he had the claim carved onto his …20
US National Kouign Amann DayObservanceAround 1860, in the Breton fishing town of Douarnenez, a baker named Yves-René Scordia (1828–1878) reportedly …20
US National Vanilla Milkshake DayFoodThe first time the word “milkshake” appeared in print, in 1885, it described an alcoholic drink. …20
World Refugee DayAwarenessOn 4 December 2000, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 55/76 and fixed 20 June as World …21
Fathers DayObservanceOn a Sunday in May 1909, Sonora Smart Dodd sat in the Central Methodist Episcopal Church in Spokane, …21
Fête de la MusiqueObservanceOn the evening of 21 June 1982, France’s new Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, called for an experiment …21
International Sushi DayFoodHere is a fact that quietly demolishes most people’s idea of sushi: the word does not mean raw fish at …21
International Yoga DayHealthOn 21 June 2015, on the wide ceremonial avenue then called Rajpath in New Delhi, just under thirty-six …21
National Selfie DayFunOn 13 September 2002, a young man posted to an Australian online forum a photograph of a split lip he had …21
World Hydrography DayObservanceOn 21 June 1921, representatives of nineteen maritime nations met in Monaco and founded the International …21
World Music DayCultureOn the evening of 21 June 1982, the streets of Paris filled with an unplanned racket of guitars, brass, choirs …23
Danish Sankt Hans AftenCultureIn June 1885, at Copenhagen’s Royal Theatre, the poet Holger Drachmann put words into the final scene of …23
International Widows DayObservanceIn 1954, in the small town of Dhilwan in the Punjab, a thirty-seven-year-old woman named Pushpa Wati Loomba …23
United Nations Public Service DayObservanceOn 20 December 2002, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 57/277 and, in a single clause, …24
Fairy DayObservanceIn the summer of 1917, in the West Yorkshire village of Cottingley, a sixteen-year-old named Elsie Wright …24
Finnish JuhannusCultureThe oldest written account of a Finnish midsummer bonfire comes from Turku in 1645, but the fires it describes …24
Praline dayObservanceA praline ordered in Brussels and a praline ordered in New Orleans have almost nothing in common. The first is …25
Day of the SeafarerObservanceOn 25 June 2010, in a conference hall at the Philippine International Convention Center in Manila, delegates …25
US National Catfish DayObservanceOn 25th June 1987, Ronald Reagan signed Proclamation 5672 and gave the United States a national day for, of …26
International Day against Drug Abuse and Illicit TraffickingHistoryIn June 1839, on the muddy flats near Humen in Guangdong, an Imperial Commissioner of Qing China named Lin …26
United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of TortureHistoryThe 26th of June carries a double weight in the history of human rights. On that date in 1945, in San …26
US National Chocolate Pudding DayFoodIn 1747, Hannah Glasse published The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, a book so successful it stayed in …27
Sunglasses DayObservanceThe Roman writer Pliny the Elder recorded that the emperor Nero watched gladiatorial combats through a …27
US National Orange Blossom DayFoodIn the 1680s, Anne-Marie Orsini, the Italian-born Princess of Nerola near Rome, took to perfuming her gloves, …28
US National Ceviche DayObservanceOn the desert coast of northern Peru, more than a thousand years before a Spanish ship carried the first lime …28
US National Tapioca DayObservanceThe word “cassava” most likely descends from the Tupi term caçábi, meaning “to …29
Camera dayObservanceSome time in 1826 or 1827, a French gentleman-inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce set a polished pewter …29
International Day of the TropicsNatureHere is a single statistic to sit with: the tropics cover roughly 40 per cent of the Earth’s surface yet …29
Waffle Iron DayFoodA medieval waffle iron was a serious object: two hinged iron plates on handles long enough to reach over an …30
International Asteroid DayNatureAt around seven in the morning on 30 June 1908, an object roughly the size of a building entered the …30
Social Media DayObservanceIn June 2010 the technology news site Mashable did something faintly contradictory: it asked the people who … Advertisement
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Canada DayObservanceOn a July afternoon in 1982, with the House of Commons nearly empty, a private member’s bill to rename …1
International Joke DayFunAround 1900 BC, a Sumerian scribe pressed into clay what is now reckoned to be the oldest recorded joke in the …1
US National Creative Ice Cream Flavor DayFoodAmong the flavours reportedly served at the early American White House, none startles the modern palate more …1
US National Gingersnap DayFoodThe biscuit is named for a sound. Break a properly baked gingersnap and it gives a brittle, audible crack — …2
US National Anisette DayObservanceIn 1755, in the port city of Bordeaux, a woman named Marie Brizard nursed an ailing West Indian sailor back to …2
World UFO DayObservanceIn the first week of July 1947, a ranch foreman named William Brazel found a scatter of foil, rubber and …3
National Fried Clam DayFoodOn the back of their wedding certificate, Lawrence and Bessie Woodman wrote a single proud line: “We …3
US Eat Beans DayObservanceThe common bean was domesticated not once but twice — independently, in two places, by two peoples who had no …3
US National Chocolate Wafer DayFoodIn July 2023, thousands of American home bakers discovered that a cookie they had relied on for decades had …4
International Day of CooperativesObservanceOn a damp December evening in 1844, twenty-eight working men unlocked the door of a rented cellar at 31 Toad …4
US Independence DayHistoryOn 3 July 1776, John Adams sat down to write to his wife Abigail and made one of the most confident wrong …4
US National Barbecue DayObservanceOn 4 July 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of American independence, towns across the country held public …4
US National Caesar Salad DayObservanceOn 4 July 1924, an Italian-born restaurateur named Caesar Cardini found his Tijuana dining room overrun. …4
US National Spareribs DayObservanceBy mid-afternoon on the Fourth of July, the smell has settled over half the back gardens in America: …5
Bikini DayObservanceOn 5 July 1946, at the Piscine Molitor swimming pool in Paris, a 19-year-old nude dancer named Micheline …5
US National Apple Turnover DayFoodEvery first Sunday of September, the small town of Saint-Calais in the Sarthe region of France holds a …6
US National Fried Chicken DayObservanceThe first widely accepted printed recipe for American fried chicken appears in The Virginia Housewife, a …6
US Take Your Webmaster to Lunch DayFoodThe word “webmaster” entered print in 1993, two years after Tim Berners-Lee put the first website …7
Japanese TanabataCultureLook up on a clear July night and you can find the whole festival written in the sky. High overhead, two of …7
US Macaroni DayObservanceIn 1802, a congressman from Massachusetts sat down to dinner at the President’s House and encountered …7
US National Strawberry Sundae DayFoodOn Sunday 3 April 1892, after services at the Unitarian church in Ithaca, New York, the Reverend John M. Scott …7
World Chocolate DayFoodIn 1828 a Dutch chemist named Coenraad Johannes van Houten patented a hydraulic press that squeezed most of …8
Cow Appreciation DayAnimalsIn 1995, a three-dimensional billboard went up in Atlanta showing two black-and-white dairy cows perched on a …8
US National Chocolate with Almonds DayFoodIn 1908, the Hershey Company took its already famous milk chocolate bar and pressed almonds into it — a small …9
Cambodian arbor dayObservanceEach 9 July, the King of Cambodia kneels in the soil of a different province and plants a tree with his own …9
US National Sugar Cookie DayFoodIn the 1740s, Moravian settlers — German-speaking Protestants of the Renewed Unity of the Brethren — founded …10
Brazilian National Pizza DayFoodIn 1985, Caio Luiz de Carvalho, then the tourism secretary for the state of São Paulo, ran a competition to …10
US National Piña colada DayObservanceIn 1954, a bartender named Ramón “Monchito” Marrero stood behind the bar of the Caribe Hilton in …11
National Mojito DayFoodAccording to the legend most often told, the mojito’s distant ancestor was mixed in 1586 off the coast …11
US National Blueberry Muffin DayFoodIn the dining room of Jordan Marsh, the grand Boston department store founded by Eben Jordan and Benjamin …11
World Population DayObservanceOn 11 July 1987 a baby was symbolically declared the world’s five-billionth person, and demographers …12
Malala DayObservanceOn 9 October 2012, a gunman from the Pakistani Taliban boarded a school bus in the Swat Valley, asked for one …12
US National Pecan Pie DayFoodThe earliest known pecan pie recipe is not Southern, not folksy and not anonymous: it appeared in …13
National French Fry DayFoodIn March 2003, the cafeterias of the United States House of Representatives quietly struck the word …13
US National BBQ DayObservanceNo government agency certifies National BBQ Day, no statute defines it, and even its date is unsettled — …13
US National French Fries DayFoodIn December 1802, a guest at one of Thomas Jefferson’s White House dinners recorded a curious dish on …14
Bastille DayHistoryOn 14 July 1789, a Paris crowd attacked a medieval fortress to lay hands on gunpowder, and held just seven …14
US National Grand Marnier DayObservanceIn 1880, in the village of Neauphle-le-Château west of Paris, a distiller named Louis-Alexandre …14
US National Mac & Cheese DayFoodIn 1802, a guest at one of Thomas Jefferson’s White House state dinners recorded with some bemusement …15
National Gummy Worm DayFoodIn 1981, a German confectioner called Trolli looked at the gummy bear, an established and entirely respectable …15
US Gummi Worm DayObservanceIn 1981, in the Bavarian town of Fürth, the German confectioner Trolli ran a brightly coloured, two-tone, …15
US National Tapioca Pudding DayObservanceRun a spoon through a good tapioca pudding and you are stirring a dish whose key ingredient began as a starch …15
World Youth Skills DayObservanceOn 18 December 2014, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution, put forward by Sri Lanka and …16
US Fresh Spinach DayObservanceIn June 1931, a wiry cartoon sailor with a corncob pipe squeezed a tin of spinach into his mouth, swelled with …16
US National Corn Fritter DayObservanceIn 1796, a domestic servant named Amelia Simmons published a slim book in Hartford, Connecticut, titled …17
US National Peach Ice Cream DayFoodOn 9th September 1843, a Philadelphia woman named Nancy Maria Johnson was granted United States Patent No. …17
World Day for International JusticeAwarenessOn 17 July 1998, after five weeks of negotiation at a diplomatic conference in Rome, 120 states voted to adopt …17
World Emoji DayFunLook closely at the calendar emoji on an iPhone — 📅 — and you will find it permanently set to 17 July. That is …18
Nelson Mandela International DayHistoryOn Robben Island, the prisoner registered as 466/64 — number 466, admitted in 1964 — was not permitted to be …18
US National Caviar DayObservanceIn September 2005, the US Fish and Wildlife Service did something that would have astonished a …19
National Ice Cream DayFoodOn 9 July 1984, Ronald Reagan sat down in the Oval Office and signed Proclamation 5219, declaring July to be …19
Raspberry pie dayFoodThe Roman agricultural writer Palladius, working in the fourth century, left one of the earliest written …19
US National Daiquiri DayObservanceAround the time of the Spanish–American War of 1898, an American mining engineer named Jennings Cox was …20
US National Fortune Cookie DayFoodIn 1983 a body called the Court of Historical Review and Appeals convened in San Francisco to settle a …20
US National Lollipop DayObservanceIn 1908, in New Haven, Connecticut, a candy maker named George Smith took a long look at a local confection: …20
World Chess DayFunOn 20 July 1924, while Paris was hosting the Summer Olympic Games, delegates from fifteen national federations …21
Racial harmony dayObservanceOn 21 July 1964, a procession in Singapore marking the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad turned to violence on …21
US National Junk Food DayFoodIn 1972, a young microbiologist named Michael Jacobson, working at the newly founded Center for Science in the …22
Pi Approximation DayObservanceIn the third century BC, a man in Syracuse drew a 96-sided polygon and concluded that the ratio of a …22
US National Penuche Fudge DayObservanceThe most surprising thing about penuche is its name, which has nothing to do with New England, where the sweet …23
US National Hot Dog DayAnimalsIn 1867, a German immigrant named Charles Feltman pushed a pie wagon through the sand of Coney Island and, …23
US National Vanilla Ice Cream DayFoodOne of only ten recipes surviving in Thomas Jefferson’s own handwriting, now held by the Library of …24
US National Drive-Thru DayObservanceIn 1948, on a stretch of U.S. Route 66 in Springfield, Missouri, a former soldier with a business degree named …24
US National Tequila DayFoodIn 1758 the Spanish king Ferdinand VI granted a parcel of land in the town of Tequila, in the Mexican state of …25
National Wine and Cheese DayFoodIn a limestone cave at Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, in the south of France, blue-veined cheeses have been left to …25
Thread The Needle DayObservanceIn 2016, archaeologists working in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia recovered a slender, …25
US National Hot Fudge Sundae DayObservanceAt a candy shop that Clarence Clifton Brown opened in downtown Los Angeles in 1906, a confectioner gently …26
Kargil Vijay DiwasObservanceImagine being ordered to attack uphill, in thin air at over 16,000 feet, across bare rock and ice, toward an …26
US National Coffee Milkshake DayFoodWhen the word “milkshake” first appeared in print in 1885, it described nothing a child would be …27
US National Creme Brulee DayObservanceIn 1691, a chef named François Massialot published a thick volume called Cuisinier royal et bourgeois, a …27
US National Scotch DayObservanceIn 1494, a clerk recording the royal accounts of Scotland noted that “eight bolls of malt” had …28
US National Milk Chocolate DayFoodIn a workshop in Vevey, on the shore of Lake Geneva, a candle-maker turned chocolatier spent seven frustrating …28
WHO World Hepatitis DayHealthIn 1967, a geneticist named Baruch Blumberg, working at what is now the Fox Chase Cancer Center in …29
International Tiger DayAnimalsIn November 2010, in a cold conference hall in St Petersburg, the heads of government of thirteen countries …29
US National Chicken Wing DayObservanceLate on the evening of 4 March 1964, Dominic Bellissimo was tending bar at the Anchor Bar on Main Street in …29
US National Lasagna DayFoodIn 1282 a Bolognese notary copied out a ballad that mentioned a dish called lasagne, and in doing so left …30
International Day of FriendshipHistoryOn the evening of 20 July 1958, a Paraguayan physician named Ramón Artemio Bracho sat down to dinner with a …30
US National Cheesecake DayFoodOn the Greek island of Samos, archaeologists have found cheese moulds dated to around 2,000 BC, and ancient …31
Hawaian flag dayObservanceOn the morning of 31 July 1843, on a dusty plain east of Honolulu, a British rear-admiral named Richard Darton …31
System Administrator Appreciation DayCultureIn the summer of 2000, a system administrator named Ted Kekatos was flicking through a Hewlett-Packard …31
US National Raspberry Cake DayFoodThe raspberry carries its origin story in its scientific name. Rubus idaeus means “bramble of … August
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www dayObservanceIn March 1989, a thirty-three-year-old British software engineer at CERN handed his manager a document titled, …1
Yorkshire DayObservanceIn 1975, in the East Riding town of Beverley, members of a year-old pressure group gathered to make a point …2
Day of Azerbaijani cinemaCultureOn 2 August 1898, in the oil-rich city of Baku, a photographer named Alexander Mishon set up a projector and …2
Ice Cream Sandwich DayFoodIn the summer of 1900, a reporter for the New York Tribune watched an unnamed pushcart vendor on the Bowery …3
US National Watermelon DayNatureIn 2021 a team of geneticists publishing through Washington University in St. Louis sequenced the genome of a …3
US National White Wine DayFoodOn 24 May 1976, in a Paris hotel, a panel of French wine experts tasted a flight of Chardonnays blind and …4
Assistance Dog DayAnimalsIn 1929, a wealthy American dog breeder named Dorothy Harrison Eustis opened a school in Morristown, New …4
Coast Guard DayObservanceIn the summer of 1790, the United States had an army and the beginnings of a navy on paper, but almost nothing …5
National Lemon Drop DayFoodPop a lemon drop on your tongue and there is a half-second of warning before the acid lands — a brief, sugary …5
Oyster DayFoodA New Yorker in the 1850s ate, on average, around 600 oysters a year. Today the average American eats fewer …5
Underwear DayObservanceOn 5 August 2003, the New York online retailer Freshpair sent models in nothing but their underwear into some …6
Mead DayObservanceIn 2002 the American Homebrewers Association, based in Boulder, Colorado, picked a Saturday in August and …6
Sandcastle DayObservanceOn 2 July 2021, in the Danish seaside town of Blokhus, thirty of the world’s most skilled sand sculptors …7
International Beer DayFoodIn 2007, in the coastal town of Santa Cruz, California, a man named Jesse Avshalomov and a small group of …7
Lighthouse DayObservanceOn 7 August 1789, barely two months into the life of the United States and before its congressmen had even …7
Psychic DayObservanceIn the spring of 1848, in a small farmhouse at Hydesville, New York, two teenage sisters named Maggie and Kate …8
Bowling DayAnimalsIn 1895, the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie was excavating a child’s grave at Naqada in Upper …8
International Cat DayAnimalsIn 2004, French archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne reported a discovery at the Neolithic site of …8
Odie DayObservanceOn 8 August 1978, a few weeks after Jim Davis’s Garfield strip began its national syndication, a yellow, …9
Book Lovers DayCultureAround the year 1455, in the German city of Mainz, a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg ran off roughly 180 …9
International Day of the Worlds Indigenous PeoplesHistoryThere are roughly 476 million Indigenous people alive today, scattered across some 90 countries, and between …10
Lazy DayFunThe Roman elite had a word for it that no English term quite captures: otium. Not idleness, exactly, and not …10
National S'mores DayFoodSomewhere in the chapter titled “The Larder”, tucked between instructions for sassafras tea and …10
US National Smore DayObservanceIn 1927, a Girl Scout handbook called Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts printed a campfire recipe …12
International Youth DayObservanceIn August 1998, ministers from around the world gathered in Lisbon for the first World Conference of Ministers …12
Youth DayObservanceOn 12 August 1998, in the final hours of a five-day meeting in Lisbon, ministers from dozens of governments …13
International Lefthanders DayObservanceIn 1976, a left-handed man from Topeka, Kansas named Dean R. Campbell decided that the world’s southpaws …13
National Prosecco DayFoodIn the summer of 1948, in a narrow bar near the Grand Canal in Venice, a barman named Giuseppe Cipriani …13
US National Filet Mignon DayObservanceIn 1906, the American short-story writer O. Henry published a collection called The Four Million, and in one …14
Creamsicle DayObservanceThe Creamsicle did not begin as a Creamsicle. It began, by the usual account, with an eleven-year-old boy …14
US National Creamsicle DayObservanceOn a cold night in 1905, an eleven-year-old boy in Oakland, California, named Francis William Epperson left a …15
Day of the Assumption of the Virgin MaryReligionOn 1 November 1950, standing in St Peter’s Square before an immense crowd, Pope Pius XII spoke the words …15
Indian Independence DayHistoryAt the stroke of the midnight hour on 14 August 1947, as the date turned to the 15th, Jawaharlal Nehru rose in …15
US National Lemon Meringue Pie DayFoodAround 1806, in a cooking school on Philadelphia’s Dock Street, a pastry-shop proprietress named …15
Victory over Japan DayHistoryAt noon on 15 August 1945, Japanese radio carried something no listener had ever heard before: the recorded …16
Bennington Battle DayObservance“There are the redcoats, and they are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow.” Those …16
US National Rum DayFoodAn anonymous Barbadian, writing around 1650, described the local spirit with no affection whatsoever: …16
US World Bratwurst DayObservanceIn 1313 the Nuremberg city council passed an ordinance laying down exactly what could go into a bratwurst, …17
Indonesian Independence DayHistoryAt ten o’clock on the morning of 17 August 1945, Sukarno stood on the porch of his own house at Jalan …17
US National Vanilla Custard DayFoodIn the summer of 1919, two brothers selling ice cream from a tile-fronted stand on the Coney Island boardwalk …18
Serendipity DayObservanceOn 28 January 1754, the English writer and politician Horace Walpole sat down to write to his friend Horace …18
US National Pinot Noir DayObservanceOn 22 February 1965, a young Californian named David Lett pushed three thousand grafted vines into the soil of …19
US National Potato DayFoodAround eight thousand years ago, on the cold, thin-aired plateau surrounding Lake Titicaca, at roughly 3,800 …19
World Humanitarian DayObservanceAt about half past four in the afternoon on 19 August 2003, a flatbed truck packed with explosives detonated …19
World Photography DayCultureOn 19 August 1839, the French government did something unusual: it bought a patentable invention from Louis …19
World Sanskrit DayCultureIn 1969, the Ministry of Education of the Government of India instructed schools and institutions to mark a …20
Indian Akshay Urja DayObservanceOn 20 August 2004, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy held the first Akshay Urja Day with a piece of …20
National Lemonade DayFoodIn twelfth-century Cairo, merchants were already bottling sweetened lemon juice and shipping it as a luxury …20
World Mosquito DayObservanceOn the evening of 20 August 1897, in a hot, fly-blown laboratory in Secunderabad in southern India, a British …21
Poets DayObservanceBefore anyone could write a poem down, people were already reciting them. The oldest named author in human …21
US National Spumoni DayObservanceSpumoni was born in Naples at the close of the nineteenth century, in a city that already took its ice creams …22
US National Eat A Peach DayFoodArchaeologists working at the waterlogged Neolithic site of Kuahuqiao, near the lower Yangzi River in eastern …22
US National Pecan Torte DayObservanceIn 1832, a sixteen-year-old apprentice named Franz Sacher was left to improvise a dessert for Prince Klemens …23
European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and NazismHistoryOn 23 August 1986, around ten thousand people gathered in Nathan Phillips Square in Toronto, wore black …23
International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its AbolitionHistoryOn the night of 22 to 23 August 1791, on the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue, enslaved men and women set …23
US National Sponge Cake DayFoodIn 1615, the English poet Gervase Markham published The English Huswife, and tucked among its instructions for …24
US National Peach Pie DayFoodWhen Amelia Simmons published American Cookery in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1796, she gave the new republic …24
US National Waffle DayFoodOn 24 August 1869, a man named Cornelius Swartwout of Troy, New York, was granted United States Patent No. …25
National Banana Split DayFoodDuring the Christmas break of 1904, a group of students from Saint Vincent College wandered into Tassell …25
US National Banana Split DayFoodIn 1904, a 23-year-old apprentice pharmacist named David Evans Strickler stood behind the soda fountain at …25
US National Whiskey Sour DayFoodIn 1862 a New York bartender named Jerry Thomas published The Bar-Tender’s Guide, the first cocktail …26
National Dog DayAnimalsWhen Colleen Paige was ten years old, her family drove to a local animal shelter and brought home a Sheltie. …26
US National Cherry Popsicle DayObservanceOne freezing night in 1905, an eleven-year-old boy in the San Francisco Bay Area called Frank Epperson left a …26
Womens Equality DayAwarenessAt eight o’clock on the morning of 26 August 1920, behind the closed doors of his own house in …27
US National Banana Lovers DayFoodAlmost every banana sold in an American supermarket is, genetically, the same plant. The Cavendish has no …27
US National Pots De Creme DayObservanceThe small lidded cup is the first clue. Before a single spoonful of pot de crème is tasted, the vessel itself …28
UK National Burger DayFoodIn 2013, an entrepreneur named Jamie Klinger noticed something that mildly annoyed him: the United States had …28
US Crackers Over The Keyboard DayObservanceIn 1983 the linguistically minded programmers who maintained the Jargon File, the long-running dictionary of …28
US National Cherry Turnover DayObservanceIn a French boulangerie the closest relative of the cherry turnover has a far prettier name than the English …29
International Day against Nuclear TestsHistoryOn 28 February 1989, the Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov broke from the script of a live televised poetry …29
National Sports DayObservanceAt the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a slight Indian field hockey captain named Dhyan Chand walked onto a rain-soaked …29
US More Herbs, Less Salt DayObservanceThe average American consumes around 3,400 milligrams of sodium a day, more than double the 1,500 milligrams …29
US National Chop Suey DayObservanceIn 1929 Edward Hopper painted two women at a table in a second-floor restaurant, a red-and-yellow “CHOP …29
US National Lemon Juice DayFoodIn May 1747, aboard the Royal Navy ship HMS Salisbury, a Scottish surgeon named James Lind divided twelve …30
International Day of the Victims of Enforced DisappearancesHistoryOn Thursday 30 April 1977, fourteen women walked into the Plaza de Mayo in central Buenos Aires, in front of …30
International Whale Shark DayAnimalsIn 1828, a British army surgeon named Andrew Smith, then living in Cape Town, examined a 4.6-metre fish that …30
US National Toasted Marshmallow DayObservanceAround 2000 BC, on the marshy banks of the Nile, Egyptians dug up the root of a plant called Althaea …31
Hari MerdekaObservanceA few minutes before midnight on 30 August 1957, the lights at the Royal Selangor Club Padang in Kuala Lumpur …31
US Trail Mix DayObservanceIn 1906 the American outdoorsman Horace Kephart, writing in his classic manual Camping and Woodcraft, … September
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Letter Writing DayObservanceIn 1837 a retired English schoolmaster named Rowland Hill published a pamphlet arguing that the entire British …1
US National Cherry Popover DayObservanceThe word “popover” first appeared in print in an American letter written in 1850, and the first …2
Lazy Moms DayFunSomewhere in the early 2010s, in the comment threads of parenting blogs and the corners of social media where …2
US National Blueberry Popsicle DayFoodOne cold night in 1905, an 11-year-old boy in Oakland, California named Frank Epperson left a cup of powdered …2
World Coconut DayFoodOn 2 September 1969, in the years after several newly independent Asian and Pacific nations were searching for …3
Bacon dayFoodThe September version of Bacon Day was born, as so many good ideas are, among hungry students with a long …3
Skyscraper DayObservanceWhen the ten-storey Home Insurance Building opened in Chicago in 1885, it did something no large building had …3
US National Welsh Rarebit DayObservanceThe earliest known appearance of the phrase “Welsh rabbit” dates to 1725, and from the very first …4
Pet Rock DayAnimalsOne evening in 1975, in a bar in Los Gatos, California, an advertising copywriter named Gary Dahl listened to …4
US National Macademia Nut DayFoodIn 1857, the German-Australian botanist Ferdinand von Mueller gave a newly catalogued rainforest tree the …5
International Day of CharityHistoryWhen Mother Teresa died in Calcutta on 5 September 1997, the woman the world knew by that name had been born …5
US National Cheese Pizza DayFoodThe most famous origin story in pizza history is probably a fake. According to the cherished legend, a …6
Defense DayObservanceBefore dawn on 6 September 1965, Indian troops crossed the international border and drove towards Lahore, one …6
US National Coffee Ice Cream DayFoodIn much of the United States, vanilla is the safe order. In New England, a sizeable share of people reach …7
Brazilian Independence DayHistoryOn the afternoon of 7 September 1822, riding beside a small stream called the Ipiranga on the outskirts of São …7
US National Acorn Squash DayObservanceSometime in the 1800s a ridged green squash made an unlikely round trip: domesticated in the Americas …7
US National Beer Lovers DayFoodAround 1800 BCE, a Sumerian scribe pressed a hymn into clay that doubled as a recipe. Addressed to Ninkasi, …7
US National Salami DayObservanceIn 1436, the military leader Niccolò Piccinino reportedly ordered pigs raised specifically for salami-making …8
Pardon DayObservanceOn Sunday 8 September 1974, Gerald Ford sat alone at his Oval Office desk and signed Proclamation 4311, …8
Unesco International Literacy DayAwarenessIn September 1965, delegates from 88 countries gathered in Tehran for the World Congress of Ministers of …9
US National Steak Au Poivre DayObservanceThe historian-chefs who have tried to pin down who invented steak au poivre cannot agree, and the list of …9
US Wienerschnitzel DayObservanceIn 2007 the Austrian parliament did something that few governments bother to do for a single dish: it wrote …10
US National TV Dinner DayFoodIn late 1953 the Swanson company had a crisis measured in railway cars. Some 260 tons of frozen turkey were …10
World Suicide Prevention DayObservanceOn 10 September 2003, in Stockholm, the International Association for Suicide Prevention launched the first …11
Patriot DayObservanceAt 8:46 a.m. on 11 September 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade …11
US National Hot Cross Bun DayObservanceIn 1361, a monk named Brother Thomas Rocliffe, attached to the refectory at St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire, …12
National Video Games DayCultureIn the 1991 edition of Chase’s Calendar of Events — the fat American reference book that catalogues …12
United Nations Day for South-South CooperationCultureOn 12 September 1978, delegations from 138 states gathered in Buenos Aires and adopted, by consensus, a plan …12
US National Chocolate Milkshake DayFoodIn 1922, behind the soda fountain of a Walgreens in Chicago, a counter worker named Ivar “Pop” …13
International Chocolate DayFoodOn 13 September 1857, in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, a boy was born who would do more than almost anyone to …13
International Programmer's DayCultureAround 2002, two software engineers at a Russian company called Parallel Technologies, Valentin Balt and …13
US International Chocolate DayFoodMilton Snavely Hershey was born on 13 September 1857 in a farmhouse in Derry Township, Pennsylvania, and that …13
US National Peanut DayFoodWhen George Washington Carver arrived at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1896, the peanut was not even …14
Hindi DayObservanceOn 14 September 1949, after three years of some of the most ill-tempered debate the Constituent Assembly of …14
US National Cream Filled Donut DayFoodIn September 1917, four Salvation Army volunteers arrived at the camp of the 1st Ammunition Train of the …14
US National Eat a Hoagie DayObservanceIn 1917, on a marshy spit of land along the Delaware River south-west of central Philadelphia, the United …15
International Day of DemocracyHistoryIn September 1997, delegates from the world’s parliaments met in Cairo and signed a document called the …15
US National Cheese Toast DayFoodIn 1968, at a Sizzler steakhouse in Hollywood, a cook took a thick slice of bread, slathered it with a …15
US National Crème de Menthe DayObservanceIn 1885, a pharmacist named Émile Giffard was working in the western French city of Angers, studying the …15
US National Double Cheeseburger DayFoodThe story usually begins on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, California, in 1924. A sixteen-year-old fry cook …15
US National Linguine DayObservanceIn the writings of Giulio Giacchero, an economist and historian of Ligurian life, linguine appears in …16
International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone LayerHistoryIn 1974, two chemists at the University of California, Irvine, Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, published …16
Malaysia DayObservanceAt a few minutes past nine on the morning of 16 September 1963, Tunku Abdul Rahman stood before a crowd at …16
Mexican Independence DayHistoryAt around half past two on the morning of 16 September 1810, in the small town of Dolores in Guanajuato, a …16
US National Cinnamon-Raisin Bread DayFoodOn 7 July 1928, in the small town of Chillicothe, Missouri, the Chillicothe Baking Company sold the first …16
US National Guacamole DayObservanceThe choice of 16 September for US National Guacamole Day is no accident. It is the day Mexico marks the start …17
International Eat An Apple DayFoodSomewhere in the Tian Shan mountains, on the border of Kazakhstan and China, there are forests where apples …17
US National Apple Dumpling DayFoodIn the farmhouse kitchens of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, an apple dumpling was as likely to turn up at …17
US National Monte Cristo sandwich DayFoodAt the Blue Bayou restaurant in Disneyland’s New Orleans Square, where diners sit in perpetual twilight …18
Gymnastics DayObservanceOn a patch of open heathland at Hasenheide, on the southern edge of Berlin, a fiery Prussian schoolmaster …18
US National Cheeseburger DayFoodThe most repeated origin story of the cheeseburger begins around 1924 at a roadside stand in Pasadena, …19
International Talk Like a Pirate DayFunOn 6 June 1995, two friends in Albany, Oregon, were playing racquetball badly. One of them, John Baur or Mark …19
US National Butterscotch Pudding DayObservanceIn 1817, a confectioner named Samuel Parkinson set up shop on the High Street in Doncaster, Yorkshire, and …20
US National Pepperoni Pizza DayFoodThe first recorded mention of pepperoni dates to 1919, in New York City, where Italian-American butchers in …20
US National Punch DayObservanceOn 28 September 1632, a clerk of the British East India Company named Robert Addams, stationed on the Indian …20
US National Rum Punch DayFood“One of sour, two of sweet, three of strong, four of weak.” A bartender in Bridgetown can recite …21
International Day of PeaceHistoryEach 21 September, in the garden on the north side of the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the …21
Japanese Respect for the Aged DayCultureIn 1947, in the small farming village of Nomadani in Hyōgo Prefecture, the local mayor proposed setting aside …21
US National Pecan Cookie DayFoodIn 1955, the Keebler Company began selling a round, crumbly biscuit it called Sandies, a pecan shortbread that …22
Autumn EquinoxNatureTwice each year, at the great stepped pyramid of Kukulkan at Chichén Itzá in Mexico, the late-afternoon sun …22
Elephant Appreciation DayAnimalsThe day began with a paperweight. In the 1990s, Wayne Hepburn, who ran a Florida graphics and publishing …22
Hobbit DayObservance“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” J. R. R. Tolkien wrote that sentence, the story …23
Hug a Vegetarian DayFunPETA is rarely accused of subtlety. The animal-rights group made its name with billboards, fake blood and …23
Restless Legs Awareness DayAwarenessIn 1672 the English physician Sir Thomas Willis, the man who first mapped the blood supply of the brain, …24
International Rabbit DayAnimalsIn 1998 a London-based welfare organisation called The Rabbit Charity set aside a Saturday in late September …24
Save Your Photos DayObservanceA glass-plate negative made in 1860 can still be printed today; you hold it to the light and there is the …24
World Maritime DayObservanceOn 17 March 1958, after a decade of diplomatic stalling, a United Nations convention finally entered into …25
German Butterbrot DayObservanceIn 1999, Germany’s agricultural marketing board looked at the country’s eating habits and grew …25
National Quesadilla DayFoodAsk for a quesadilla in a market in Mexico City and you may be asked, with complete seriousness, whether you …26
European Day of LanguagesCultureOn 6 December 2001, in Strasbourg, the Council of Europe quietly took a decision that has shaped a small …26
International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear WeaponsHistoryOn 25 October 1955, a twelve-year-old girl named Sadako Sasaki died in a Hiroshima hospital of leukaemia, ten …26
US National Better Breakfast DayFoodIn 1863, at his health resort in Dansville, New York, a physician named James Caleb Jackson took graham flour, …26
US National Dumpling Day National Chocolate Milk DayFoodIn 2024, archaeologists working at a site in Shandong Province in eastern China unearthed dumplings roughly …26
US National Pancake DayFoodIn 1991, archaeologists studying the gut contents and tools of Ötzi, the 5,300-year-old “Iceman” …26
World Contraception DayObservanceIn 2007 a coalition of ten reproductive-health organisations agreed on a single, deliberately blunt mission …27
US National Chocolate Milk DayFoodLondon’s Natural History Museum still lists Sir Hans Sloane, the Irish physician whose collection seeded …27
US National Corned Beef Hash DayObservanceThe “corn” in corned beef is not corn at all. It is salt — specifically the coarse, grain-sized …27
World Tourism DayObservanceIn 1971, at a meeting in Istanbul of the International Union of Official Travel Organisations, a Nigerian …28
US Family DayObservanceIn 1996, researchers at the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, then based at Columbia …28
US National Drink Beer DayFoodIn 1992 archaeologists excavating the Sumerian city of Godin Tepe, in what is now western Iran, scraped a …28
US National Strawberry Cream Pie DayFoodIn 1714 a French military engineer named Amédée-François Frézier sailed home from Chile with five live …28
World Rabies DayObservanceOn 6 July 1885 a nine-year-old Alsatian boy named Joseph Meister, mauled fourteen times by a rabid dog, was …29
US National Biscotti DayObservanceIn 1858, in the old centre of Prato in Tuscany, a baker named Antonio Mattei opened a shop and began producing …29
US National Coffee DayFoodOn 29 September 2009, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans staged the first New Orleans Coffee …29
World Heart DayHealthThe idea belonged to a Catalan cardiologist. Antoni Bayés de Luna, who served as president of the World Heart …30
Extra Virgin Olive Oil DayFoodIn the village of Ano Vouves on the Greek island of Crete stands an olive tree so old that its trunk has …30
International Podcast DayCultureIn the summer of 2013, a podcaster from Tehachapi, California named Steve Lee heard a radio spot announcing …30
US National Hot Mulled Cider DayFoodOn the night of Old Twelvey, 17 January, in the cider counties of Somerset and Devon, men once carried a … Advertisement
October
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International Coffee DayFoodOn 1 October 2015, on the opening day of International Coffee Day, the crowds at Expo Milano gathered around …1
International Day of Older PersonsHistoryIn the summer of 1982, delegates gathered in Vienna for an unusual sort of summit. There were no border …1
World Vegetarian DayObservanceOn 3 October 1847, a few dozen reformers met at Northwood Villa, a hydropathic establishment in Ramsgate on …2
Gandhi JayanthiObservanceOn 2 October 1869, in the coastal town of Porbandar on the Kathiawar peninsula of western India, Mohandas …2
International Day of Non-ViolenceHistoryOn 12 March 1930, a thin man of sixty in a homespun loincloth walked out of the Sabarmati Ashram with …2
National Custard DayFoodA recipe for daryols appears in The Forme of Cury, an English cookery roll compiled around 1390 by the master …2
World Farm Animals DayAnimalsIn the summer of 1981, a chemist named Alex Hershaft gathered animal-rights pioneers at Cedar Crest College in …2
World Smile DayFunIn 1963, a freelance commercial artist in Worcester, Massachusetts, named Harvey Ball spent roughly ten …3
German Unity DayObservanceAt the stroke of midnight on 3 October 1990, a black, red and gold flag was raised in front of the Reichstag …3
Korean National Foundation DayCultureA bear and a tiger, the old story goes, once begged a god to make them human. He set them a hundred days in a …3
Virus Appreciation DayObservanceIn 1898, working in the Netherlands on a disease that mottled tobacco leaves, the microbiologist Martinus …4
Swedish National Cinnamon Bun DayFoodIn 1999 the Home Baking Council, a Swedish trade body called Hembakningsrådet, turned forty, and rather than …4
US National Taco DayFoodThe first written mention of the taco does not describe food at all. In eighteenth-century Mexican silver …4
US National Vodka DayFoodIn 1938 a Hartford businessman named John G. Martin bought the American rights to a Russian-émigré brand …4
World Animal DayAnimalsOn 24th March 1925, more than five thousand people crowded into the Sport Palace in Berlin for a cause that …5
International Day of No ProstitutionHistoryIn 2002, a group of feminist activists in the United States who had themselves survived the sex trade decided …5
Unesco World Teachers’ DayObservanceOn 5 October 1966, delegates meeting in Paris adopted a document few people outside the profession have ever …6
German-American DayObservanceOn 6 October 1683, a small ship called the Concord dropped anchor at Philadelphia carrying thirteen German …6
US National Noodle DayFoodIn 2005, archaeologists working at Lajia in Qinghai province, north-western China, lifted an overturned …7
Bathtub DayObservanceAround five thousand years ago, in the planned city of Mohenjo-daro on the floodplain of the Indus, builders …7
International Trigeminal Neuralgia Awareness DayAwarenessOn the evening of 7 October 2013, a series of famous landmarks across the world were deliberately bathed in …8
Pierogi DayFoodThe pierogi is one of very few foods to have a patron saint. According to a legend cherished in Poland, Saint …8
World Migratory Bird DayAnimalsIn 1993, ornithologists at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center in Washington launched a modest awareness …8
World Octopus DayObservanceWorld Octopus Day has a refreshingly specific birthplace: an online forum. The observance grew out of The …9
Beer and Pizza DayFoodIn June 1889 a Neapolitan baker named Raffaele Esposito was summoned to make pizzas for Queen Margherita of …9
Fire Prevention DayObservanceOn the evening of 8 October 1871, a fire broke out in or near a barn on DeKoven Street, on the West Side of …9
Korean Hangul DayCultureIn the ninth month of 1446, the Korean court published a slim document with an ambitious title: …9
World Post DayObservanceOn 9 October 1874, delegates from 22 nations gathered in the Swiss capital and signed the Treaty of Bern, …10
International Observe the Moon NightNatureIn June 2009, a single Atlas V rocket carried two NASA spacecraft towards the Moon, the Lunar Reconnaissance …10
Mochi DayObservanceTwo people stand over a heavy wooden mortar in a temple courtyard. One swings a long-handled mallet; the other …10
WHO World Mental Health DayHealthOn 10 October 1992, the World Federation for Mental Health marked the first World Mental Health Day, an …11
National Coming Out DayObservanceOn 11 October 1987, around half a million people marched on Washington for lesbian and gay rights, filling the …11
US National Sausage Pizza DayFoodWhen Italian families began arriving in the United States in large numbers in the late 1800s, they carried Old …12
National Gumbo DayFoodIn 1803, at a gubernatorial reception in New Orleans, gumbo was set before the guests, and the following year, …12
Pet Obesity Awareness DayHealthIn 2007, an American veterinarian named Dr Ernie Ward founded the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention, …12
World Arthritis DayCultureIn 1996 a coalition of patient organisations calling itself Arthritis and Rheumatism International set aside …13
Ada Lovelace DayHistoryIn 2009, a British technologist named Suw Charman-Anderson grew tired of a recurring pattern: at the …13
International Day for Disaster ReductionHistoryOn 22 December 1989 the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 44/236 and, almost as a footnote to …13
World Sight DayObservanceOn 8 October 1998, Lions Clubs International marked the first World Sight Day, an outgrowth of its SightFirst …14
US National Dessert DayFoodThe word “dessert” first appears in writing in 1539, and it does not mean what you might expect. …14
World Standards DayObservanceOn 14 October 1946, delegates from twenty-five countries gathered in London and agreed to create an …15
Global Handwashing DayObservanceIn the summer of 2008, in a conference hall in Stockholm, a coalition of public-health bodies and …15
International Day of Rural WomenHistoryIn September 1995, in a conference hall in Beijing, delegates to the Fourth World Conference on Women argued …15
Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance DayHistoryAt seven o’clock on the evening of 15 October, in a sequence repeated across every time zone, a candle …16
Dictionary DayObservanceIn 1807, a Connecticut schoolmaster sat down to write a dictionary and did not finish it for twenty-one years. …16
National Boss's DayObservanceIn 1958, a secretary at the State Farm Insurance office in Deerfield, Illinois, walked into the United States …16
World Bread DayFoodWhen archaeologists sifted the floor of a 14,400-year-old hearth at Shubayqa in north-eastern Jordan, they …16
World Food DayFoodOn 16 October 1945, in the bombed-out city of Quebec, delegates from forty-two nations signed the constitution …17
International Day for the Eradication of PovertyHistoryOn 17 October 1987, around a hundred thousand people gathered on the Plaza of Human Rights and Liberties at …17
International Day of the Intangible Cultural HeritageCultureWhen UNESCO drew up its first lists of intangible heritage in 2008, the inaugural entries included things no …17
National Pasta DayFoodIn 1154 the Arab geographer al-Idrisi, working at the court of the Norman king Roger II in Palermo, described …17
Spreadsheet DayObservanceOn 17 October 1979 a small Boston software house called Personal Software put a programme on sale for the …18
No Beard DayAnimalsWhen Alexander the Great ordered his Macedonian soldiers to shave before the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, he …18
US National Chocolate Cupcake DayFoodIn 1796, a cook named Amelia Simmons published American Cookery in Hartford, Connecticut, the first cookbook …19
Evaluate Your Life DayObservanceIn 399 BC, an elderly Athenian stood before a jury that had just sentenced him to death and refused the …19
Global Dignity DayObservanceThe idea took shape among an unlikely trio: a future king, a Finnish philosopher and an American banker turned …20
US National Brandied Fruit DayFoodIn the mid-1970s, a particular glass jar appeared on kitchen counters across suburban America: cloudy with …20
World Statistics DayObservanceOn 20 October 2010, statistical offices in more than a hundred countries simultaneously celebrated something …21
Back To The Future DayObservanceAt one minute past four in the afternoon on 21 October 2015, a DeLorean lands in a back alley and Doc Brown …21
National Pumpkin Cheesecake DayFoodIn 1570, the papal cook Bartolomeo Scappi published Opera, a monumental six-volume work of Renaissance …21
Reptile Awareness DayAnimalsOn a handful of windswept islands off New Zealand lives an animal that has barely changed since long before …22
Caps Lock DayObservanceIn 2000, an American software developer named Derek Arnold, fed up with people SHOUTING AT ONE ANOTHER in …22
International Stuttering Awareness DayAwarenessJoe Biden has described lying awake as a boy, memorising whole passages of speech to predict which words would …23
Mole DayObservanceOn 15 May 1991, a high-school chemistry teacher in the small Wisconsin town of Prairie du Chien filed the …23
US National Boston Creme Pie DayFoodIn October 1856, the newly opened Parker House hotel on Boston’s School Street put a “Chocolate …24
United Nations DayObservanceAt an opera house in San Francisco in the spring of 1945, with the war in Europe in its final weeks, delegates …24
US National Bologna DayObservanceIn 1883, a German immigrant named Oscar F. Mayer opened a meat market in Chicago, making sausages by hand …24
US National Food DayFoodIn 1975, the Center for Science in the Public Interest set out to do for food what Earth Day, five years …24
World Development Information DayObservanceOn 19 December 1972, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 3038, establishing World …25
US National Greasy Food DayFoodIn 1942, two former vaudevillians named Neil and Carl Fletcher introduced a hot dog dipped in sweetened …25
World Pasta DayFoodOn 25 October 1995, forty pasta producers from across four continents sat down together in Rome for the first …26
Howl At The Moon DayAnimalsOn a still night in Yellowstone, a wolf’s howl can carry roughly ten miles across the valleys — far …26
Intersex Awareness DayAwarenessOn the morning of 26 October 1996, a small group of demonstrators gathered outside the Boston hotel where the …26
National Pumpkin DayFoodOn 9 October 2023, at the World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off in Half Moon Bay, California, a Minnesota …27
Iranian National Cheeseburger DayFoodIn 1994, an Iranian entrepreneur opened what he hoped would be the country’s first McDonald’s …27
Unesco World Day for Audiovisual HeritageCultureOn 27 October 1980, the General Conference of UNESCO, meeting at its twenty-first session, adopted the …28
Plush Animal Lovers DayAnimalsOn 14 November 1902, on a hunting trip near the Mississippi border, President Theodore Roosevelt refused to …28
US National Chocolate dayFoodIn the markets of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, a rabbit cost ten cacao beans, a turkey hen a hundred, and a …28
World Animation DayCultureOn the evening of 28 October 1892, in a darkened room at the Musée Grévin in Paris, the French inventor …29
US National Cat DayAnimalsIn 2004, French archaeologists led by Jean-Denis Vigne announced a find from the Neolithic site of …29
US National Oatmeal DayObservanceOats began their career as a nuisance. For thousands of years they grew as a weed among the wheat and barley …30
US Haunted Refrigerator NightObservanceThe scariest thing in most American homes on the night of 30 October is not a costumed neighbour or a carved …30
US National Candy Corn DayFoodIn the 1880s, a Wunderle Candy Company employee in Philadelphia named George Renninger pulled off a small feat …31
HalloweenObservanceTwo thousand years ago, on the hills of ancient Ireland and Britain, the Celts gathered at the close of the …31
US National Caramel Apple DayFoodAround 1950, a Kraft Foods sales representative named Dan Walker found himself with a surplus of the …31
World Cities DayObservanceAt the closing ceremony of Expo 2010 in Shanghai — a six-month world’s fair whose theme was … November
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All Saints DayReligionOn 13 May in the year 609 or 610, Pope Boniface IV stood in the Pantheon in Rome — a domed temple built …1
International Lennox-Gastaut Syndrome Awareness DayAwarenessIn September 1966, neurologists from around the world gathered in Marseille for the second of a series of …1
US National Cook For Your Pets DayAnimalsAround 1860, an American electrician named James Spratt arrived in London selling lightning rods and noticed …1
US National French Fried Clam DayObservanceOn 3 July 1916, in the village of Essex, Massachusetts, a clam-shack owner named Lawrence “Chubby” …1
US National Vinegar DayObservanceAround 5000 BCE, the Babylonians were already making vinegar from dates, figs and beer, using it to preserve …1
World Vegan DayObservanceIn November 1944, a woodworking teacher from Yorkshire named Donald Watson gathered six like-minded people in …2
All Souls DayReligionSometime around the turn of the first millennium, an abbot named Odilo, head of the great monastery of Cluny …2
Day of the DeadCultureIn 1910, a Mexican printmaker named José Guadalupe Posada etched a skeleton in a fine feathered hat and called …2
International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against JournalistsHistoryOn 2 November 2013, two journalists from Radio France Internationale, Ghislaine Dupont and Claude Verlon, were …2
US National Deviled Egg DayFoodIn the fourth- or fifth-century Roman cookbook De Re Coquinaria, attributed to the gourmet Apicius, there is a …3
Japanese Culture DayCultureOn the morning of 3 November each year, a small group of recipients gathers in the State Room of the Imperial …3
Jellyfish DayObservanceA jellyfish has no brain, no heart, no bones and no blood, and yet it has outlasted nearly everything that …3
US National Sandwich DayFoodOn 24 November 1762, the English historian Edward Gibbon — the man who would later write The Decline and Fall …4
US National Candy DayFoodThe word arrived in English by way of a long journey: from the Sanskrit khanda, meaning a piece or fragment of …4
US National Eating Healthy DayHealthFor eight years running, between 2009 and 2016, the American Heart Association picked the first Wednesday of …5
Bonfire NightObservanceIn the small hours of 5 November 1605, a search party working its way through the cellars beneath the House of …5
Guy Fawkes NightHistoryIn the small hours of 5 November 1605, a man giving his name as John Johnson was found in a cellar beneath the …5
US National Doughnut DayFoodThe United States is one of very few countries to celebrate the same food twice in one year, and the doughnut …6
International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment inHistoryIn the first months of 1991, as Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait, they set fire to more than 600 oil wells. …6
US National Nachos DayObservanceOne evening in 1943, a group of American army wives walked into the Victory Club in Piedras Negras, a Mexican …7
Swedish National Mud Cake DayFoodThere is a tidy origin story that Swedes like to tell about their national chocolate cake, and it begins in …7
US National Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds DayFoodIn 1826, in the Swiss town of Serrières near Neuchâtel, a 29-year-old confectioner named Philippe Suchard …8
Intersex Day of RemembranceHistoryOn 8 November 1838, in the small French town of Saint-Jean-d’Angély, a child was born and registered as …8
US Cook Something Bold and Pungent DayObservanceCut into a raw onion and your eyes sting within seconds. The reason is a tiny, volatile molecule called …8
US National Cappuccino DayObservanceOn 5 September 1938, a Milanese named Giovanni Achille Gaggia filed patent number 365726 for a coffee machine …8
US National Harvey Wallbanger DayObservanceIn 1969, an importer in San Francisco needed to sell more of a tall, golden, vanilla-scented Italian liqueur …8
US National Shot DayObservanceOn 14 May 1796, in the Gloucestershire market town of Berkeley, a country doctor named Edward Jenner took …9
Iqbal DayObservanceIn 1930, at the annual session of the All-India Muslim League in Allahabad, a frail-looking lawyer with a …9
US National Scrapple DayFoodIn a diner in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the cook does not ask whether you want scrapple — only how thick …9
World Freedom DayAwarenessAt a televised press conference on the evening of 9 November 1989, an East German official named Günter …10
US National Vanilla Cupcake DayFoodIn 1796, in the first cookbook written and published by an American, a woman named Amelia Simmons gave …10
World Science Day for Peace and DevelopmentScienceIn June and July 1999, some eighteen hundred delegates from around the world gathered in Budapest for the …11
Armistice DayHistoryAt 5:10 on the morning of 11 November 1918, in a railway carriage parked on a siding in the Forest of …11
Pepero DayObservanceThe first documented trace of Pepero Day appears in a South Korean news report from 1996, describing a habit …11
Pocky DayObservanceWrite the date 11 November in figures and you get 11/11, four slim vertical strokes standing in a row. To the …11
Remembrance DayHistoryAt eleven o’clock on the morning of 11 November 1918, in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne …11
Singles' DayCultureIn 1993, a group of bachelors in the dormitories of Nanjing University settled on 11 November as their own …11
US National Sundae DayObservanceOn Sunday, 3 April 1892, a Unitarian minister named John M. Scott walked into Platt & Colt Pharmacy in …11
Veterans DayHistoryAt eleven o’clock on the morning of 11 November 1918, the guns on the Western Front fell silent. The …12
US Chicken Soup for the Soul DayFoodBy the time Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen finished assembling their manuscript of 101 short, uplifting …12
US National Happy Hour DayFunAround 1913, a group of bored sailors aboard the US Navy battleship USS Arkansas formed a club they called the …12
US National Pizza with the Works Except Anchovies DayFoodThe anchovy is the only pizza topping famous enough to have a national holiday named after the fact that …12
World Pneumonia DayObservanceOn 12 November 2009, more than a hundred organisations — child-health charities, vaccine alliances, research …13
US National Indian Pudding DayObservanceFor 192 years, a single Boston restaurant kept a colonial dessert alive on its menu. Durgin-Park, opened near …13
World Kindness DayObservanceIn March 1963, Seiji Kaya, then president of the University of Tokyo, gave a farewell address to his …14
US National Pickle DayFoodAround 2030 BC, traders are thought to have carried cucumbers from India to the Tigris valley, where the …14
US National Spicy Guacamole DayObservanceThe Aztecs had a word for it long before anyone in the United States thought to give it a calendar date: …14
World Diabetes DayHealthOn the night of 31 October 1920, the London, Ontario surgeon Frederick Banting woke with an idea scrawled in …15
Japanese Shichi-Go-SanCultureOn 15 November 1681, the shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi is said to have taken his ailing young son Tokumatsu to a …15
National Bundt DayFoodIn 1950, a group of women from the Minneapolis chapter of Hadassah, the Jewish women’s organisation, …15
US National Clean Out Your Refrigerator DayObservanceIn 1999, the home economists at Whirlpool Home Appliances created a holiday to sell a chore. Reasoning that …15
US National Spicy Hermit Cookie DayFoodIn 1880, two cookbooks printed on opposite sides of the same year carried a recipe for something called …16
Unesco International Day for ToleranceHistoryOn 16 November 1995, in Paris, the member states of UNESCO signed the Declaration of Principles on Tolerance, …16
US National Fast Food DayFoodIn 1921, in Wichita, Kansas, a short-order cook named Walter Anderson and an insurance man named Billy Ingram …17
US Homemade Bread DayFoodIn 2018, archaeologists working at a site called Shubayqa 1 in the Black Desert of north-eastern Jordan …17
US National Baklava DayObservanceOn the fifteenth day of Ramadan, the Sultan in Istanbul would order trays of baklava distributed to the …17
World Prematurity DayObservanceThe date of World Prematurity Day was not chosen by committee or for symbolic neatness. It is 17 November …18
US National Apple Cider DayFoodJohn Chapman — the barefoot nurseryman remembered as Johnny Appleseed, born in Massachusetts in 1774 — did not …18
US National Vichyssoise DayObservanceIn 1917, the chef de cuisine of the Ritz-Carlton in New York set out to invent a cold soup that would startle …19
Citizens DayObservanceOn 19 November 1948, a former American bomber pilot named Garry Davis stood up in the middle of a United …19
German National Soup DayFoodBy the middle of November the light in northern Germany is already failing by four in the afternoon, the …19
International Journalists Day of remembranceHistoryOn the afternoon of 16 October 2017, the Maltese investigative reporter Daphne Caruana Galizia drove away from …19
International Mens DayObservanceIn 1999, a history lecturer at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago picked a date for a …19
US Carbonated Beverage with Caffeine DayObservanceIn May 1886, a Confederate veteran and pharmacist named John Stith Pemberton began selling a dark syrup from …19
World Philosophy DayCultureIn November 2002, UNESCO held the first World Philosophy Day, and three years later, at its 33rd General …19
World Toilet DayObservanceIn 2001 a Singaporean businessman named Jack Sim, having made his fortune in construction and decided he had …20
Africa Industrialization DayObservanceIn December 1989, the United Nations General Assembly passed resolution 44/237 and fixed 20 November as Africa …20
Universal Children’s DayAwarenessIn 1924, in the aftermath of a war that had killed and orphaned children on an industrial scale, the League of …20
Universal Childrens DayAwarenessOn 20 November 1959, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, …20
US National Peanut Butter Fudge DayFoodIn 1888, a Vassar College student named Emelyn Battersby Hartridge made a thirty-pound batch of fudge in her …21
US National Stuffing DayObservanceThe oldest stuffing recipes we can read come from De Re Coquinaria, the Roman cookery collection attributed to …21
World Television DayHealthOn 21 and 22 November 1996, the United Nations held its first World Television Forum, gathering broadcasters …22
US National Cranberry Relish DayFoodIn November 1959, two and a half weeks before Thanksgiving, Arthur Flemming, the United States Secretary of …23
US National Cashew DayFoodSometime between 1560 and 1565, Portuguese ships working down the western coast of India unloaded an …23
US National Eat A Cranberry DayFoodIn 1816, a Revolutionary War veteran named Henry Hall, farming near the beach in Dennis on Cape Cod, noticed …24
National Sardines DayFoodIn 1824, a confectioner named Pierre-Joseph Colin opened a cannery in Nantes and began sealing sardines in oil …24
US National Espresso DayObservanceIn 1901, a Milanese manufacturer named Luigi Bezzera filed a patent for a machine that forced hot water and …25
International Day for the Elimination of Violence against WomenHistoryOn the evening of 25 November 1960, a jeep was found at the bottom of a 150-foot ravine on a mountain road …25
US National Parfait DayObservanceIn 1869 the French chef Jules Gouffé published Le Livre de Cuisine, and tucked among its recipes was a parfait …26
National Cake DayFoodLong before anyone thought to pipe a rose of buttercream or wish over a candle, the cooks of ancient Egypt …26
US National Cake DayFoodIn 1843, a Birmingham chemist named Alfred Bird mixed bicarbonate of soda with an acid to make a raising agent …26
World Olive DayFoodIn October 2019, at the 40th session of UNESCO’s General Conference in Paris, delegates unanimously …27
US National Bavarian Cream Pie DayFoodThe most misleading thing about Bavarian cream is its name. It is not a German dessert; it was perfected in …28
US National French Toast DayObservanceA Roman recipe collection compiled under the name of the gourmet Apicius, surviving in a text usually dated to …29
International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian PeopleHistoryOn 29 November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted on resolution 181, the Partition Plan, which …29
US National Chocolates DayFoodIn 1868, a chocolate-maker in Birmingham named Richard Cadbury found himself with a surplus of cocoa butter, a …29
US National Lemon Cream Pie DayFoodLate November is a season of heavy desserts: dense fruit cakes, suet puddings, the lingering aftermath of …29
US Throw Out Your Leftovers DayObservanceThe date is not arbitrary. US Throw Out Your Leftovers Day falls on 29 November, and the choice is governed by …30
Cities for Life DayObservanceOn the evening of 30 November, the floodlights pick out the Colosseum in Rome and hold it in a steady golden …30
Scottish Saint Andrews DayReligionAccording to a legend the Scots have cherished for more than a thousand years, on the eve of a battle near the …30
US National Mousse DayObservanceAt a banquet in the early eighteenth century at the Palace of Versailles, a guest reaching for the mousse … December
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National Peppermint Bark DayFoodIn 1998, after roughly twenty rounds of recipe testing, Chuck Williams and the test kitchen of the homeware …1
Rosa Parks DayHistoryAt about half past five on the evening of 1 December 1955, a 42-year-old seamstress named Rosa Louise Parks …1
U.A.E Commemoration DayObservanceOn the morning of 30 November 1971, two days before the United Arab Emirates was founded, Iranian forces …1
US Eat a Red Apple DayFoodThe apple in your hand is descended from a wild tree that still grows in the Tian Shan mountains of southern …1
World AIDS DayHealthIn 1988, two information officers at the World Health Organization’s Global Programme on AIDS, James W. …2
International Day for the Abolition of SlaveryHistoryOn 2 December 1949, in resolution 317, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention for the …2
National Mutt DayAnimalsIn a shelter kennel somewhere this morning there is a dog whose paperwork reads, in the space marked …2
US National Fritters DayObservanceThe Romans had a name for it: scriblita, a batter of flour and egg wrapped around vegetables, meat, or seafood …3
United Nations International Day of Persons with DisabilitiesHistoryOn 14 December 1992, with resolution 47/3, the United Nations General Assembly fixed 3 December as the annual …4
US National Cookie DayFoodIn 1987, Matt Nader, who four years earlier had founded the Blue Chip Cookie Company in San Francisco with his …5
Day of the NinjaFunIn 2003 a website called Ninja Burger was selling a joke. It claimed, with mock seriousness, to deliver fast …5
International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social DevelopmentObservanceOn 17 December 1985, the United Nations General Assembly passed a short resolution numbered 40/212 that did …5
World Soil DayNatureThe date of 5 December was not chosen at random. It is the birthday of Vasily Vasilyevich Dokuchaev, the …6
Finnish Independence DayHistoryOn the afternoon of 6 December 1917, in a Helsinki where the sun had already set hours earlier, the Parliament …6
Mitten Tree DayNatureIn 1949, the children of the Primary Department of St Luke’s Lutheran Church clipped mittens and gloves …6
Put on your own Shoes DayObservanceAsk any parent to name the small, hard-won victories of early childhood and the chances are that putting on …6
St. Nicholas DayReligionOn the night of 5 December, children across the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium and Austria leave a shoe by the …7
International Civil Aviation DayScienceOn 7 December 1944, with the Second World War still raging, delegates from 52 nations gathered in Chicago and …8
US National Brownie DayObservanceIn 1893, Bertha Palmer, the Chicago socialite running the Palmer House hotel with her husband Potter, gave her …9
International Anti-Corruption DayAwarenessBetween 9 and 11 December 2003, delegates from across the world gathered in the colonial city of Mérida, on …9
International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of theHistoryIn 1944, a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin needed a word for a crime that had no name. Working in …9
National Llama DayAnimalsA llama hums. Not a tuneful sound, more a low, resonant mmm that a mother makes to her newborn cria within …10
Human Rights DayAwarenessLate in the evening of 10 December 1948, in the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, the United Nations General …10
Swedish Nobel DayHistoryOn 27 November 1895, in the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Alfred Nobel signed a will so short and so …10
Us national lager dayObservanceAround 1840, in a modest house in Philadelphia, a Bavarian immigrant named John Wagner brewed beer in an …11
International Mountain DayNatureIn 2002, delegates filing through conferences from Kyrgyzstan to Quito found themselves talking, often for the …11
US National Have A Bagel DayObservanceIn a set of Jewish community regulations written in Kraków in 1610, a particular ring of baked dough is named …11
US National Noodle Ring DayFoodOpen almost any American community cookbook printed between the 1920s and the 1960s — a church-circle …12
Gingerbread House DayFoodIn 1812, the Brothers Grimm published a tale about two abandoned children who stumble through a dark forest …12
National Ambrosia DayFoodIn 1867, two years after the end of the American Civil War, a Southern cookbook called Dixie Cookery set down …12
Poinsettia DayObservanceOn 12 December 1851, Joel Roberts Poinsett died at Stateburg, South Carolina, a former congressman, the first …12
US National Ding-a-Ling DayObservanceIn 1972, a man named Franky Hyle from Melrose Park, Illinois, placed a small advertisement in Chase’s …13
National Cocoa DayFoodWhen the Spanish broke into the storerooms of Tenochtitlan in 1519, they found one chamber stacked with what …13
Swedish Lucia DayCultureOn a December morning in central Stockholm in 1928, a young woman named Solveig Hedengran was crowned the …13
US National Ice Cream DayFoodOn 9 July 1984, Ronald Reagan sat down and signed Presidential Proclamation 5219, declaring July to be …14
National Bouillabaisse DayObservanceIn 1980, eleven restaurateurs in Marseille sat down together and did something a dish rarely inspires: they …14
Roast Chestnuts DayFoodThe most famous chestnuts in the English-speaking world were written down during a brutal heatwave. In July …15
International Tea DayFoodIn 1848 the East India Company hired a Scottish botanist named Robert Fortune to commit one of history’s …15
US National Cupcake DayFoodIn 1796, in the first cookbook written by an American and published in America, Amelia Simmons gave …16
Victory day of BangladeshHistoryAt about 4.30 in the afternoon on 16 December 1971, on the open grass of the Ramna Race Course in Dhaka, …17
US National Maple Syrup DayObservanceLong before any European set foot in the north-eastern woodlands, the peoples of the region had already worked …17
Wright Brothers DayHistoryAt 10:35 on the morning of 17 December 1903, on a wind-scoured stretch of dune near Kitty Hawk, North …18
Arabic Language DayCultureOn 18 December 1973, the United Nations General Assembly took a vote in New York that added Arabic to its …18
Brazilian National Muffin DayObservanceThe word “muffin” first appears in print in 1703, spelled “moofin”, and even then …18
International Migrants DayAwarenessOn 18 December 1990, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a treaty with one of the longest names in …18
National Ugly Sweater DayFunIn December 2002, two friends in Vancouver named Chris Boyd and Jordan Birch threw a party at the Coquitlam …19
Look for an Evergreen DayObservanceHigh in the White Mountains of eastern California stands a Great Basin bristlecone pine known as Methuselah, a …19
National Hard Candy DayFoodAround 1670, the choirmaster of Cologne Cathedral, exasperated by fidgeting children during the long Christmas …19
Oatmeal Muffin DayObservanceThe oatmeal muffin is the product of an unlikely marriage: a grain that fed Scottish farm labourers through …20
International Human Solidarity DayAwarenessWhen the United Nations drew up its Millennium Declaration in the year 2000, it listed a handful of values it …20
US National Sangria DayObservanceThe Real Academia Española, the body that guards the Spanish language, defines sangría as a refreshing drink …21
US National Hamburger DayFoodIn 1895, in a cramped lunch wagon in New Haven, Connecticut, a Danish immigrant named Louis Lassen is said to …21
Winter SolsticeNatureOn the longest night of the year, when the sun traces its lowest, briefest arc across the southern sky and …22
Dongji Korean Winter SolsticeCultureOn the longest night of the year, a Korean kitchen fills with the earthy smell of red beans simmering down to …22
US National Date Nut Bread DayFoodFor much of the twentieth century, American shoppers could buy date nut bread in a can — a literal cylinder of …23
FestivusObservanceOn 18 December 1997, an episode of Seinfeld titled “The Strike” introduced America to a holiday …23
Roots DayObservanceIn 1976 an American writer named Alex Haley published a book that sent millions of people rummaging through …24
Christmas EveReligionLate on the night of 24 December 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force, dug into the waterlogged …24
US National Eggnog DayFoodAt Mount Vernon, the kitchen accounts record that George Washington served eggnog to his guests, and a recipe …25
Christmas DayReligionThe earliest surviving record of Christmas being celebrated on 25 December is a Roman document from the year …25
Good Governance Day IndiaObservanceOn 25 December 2014, while much of the world marked Christmas, the government of India inaugurated a holiday …25
Quaid-e-Azam DayObservanceOn 25 December 1876, in a house known as Wazir Mansion in the port city of Karachi, then part of British …25
US National Pumpkin Pie DayFoodIn 1796, a writer who identified herself only as “an American orphan” published a thin book called …26
Boxing DayObservanceOn 7 August 1871, a Liberal MP and banker named Sir John Lubbock secured Royal Assent for the Bank Holidays …27
US National Fruitcake DayFoodThere exists, in Tecumseh, Michigan, a fruitcake baked in 1878, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president. It has …28
Card Playing DayObservanceThe earliest written mention of playing cards we possess comes from a Chinese text describing how, around the …30
National Bacon DayFoodIn 1997, two friends named Danya Goodman and Meff Leonard decided the year needed one more reason to gather …30
US National Bicarbonate of Soda DayObservanceIn a dry valley northwest of Cairo called the Wadi Natrun, ancient Egyptian embalmers harvested a white, …31
New Years EveObservanceAt the very end of 1907, the owner of The New York Times, Adolph Ochs, had a problem. The city had just banned …31
US National Champagne DayFoodFor much of the seventeenth century, the bubbles in Champagne were regarded not as a triumph but as a defect. … Advertisement