Arrrgghh! Unless you be living under a barnacle-covered rock ye know that today,
September 19th be National Talk Like a Pirate Day! A day that harkens back to
an important piratical tradition all the way back in the Golden Age of Piracy in the year
nineteen hundred and ninety five. And that not be good enough reason for you to drink rum,
today also be National Butterscotch Pudding Day!
In fact every day on the calendar represents several of these unofficial holidays in addition
to numerous awareness weeks and months. Some are supported by governments in various ways,
they might represent awareness of a social movement or an illness, they might represent a
celebration of a cultural icon or a type of food, often supported by whatever industry produces that
food. Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but yesterday was National Cheeseburger Day
and tomorrow is National Miniature Golf Day. Where did this idea even come from? Well the underlying
idea would have been familiar to an ancient Roman, but each of these celebrations has a history
all its own. History, yea scurvy bilge rats, that is deserving to be remembered. Arrrgghh!
National Talk Like a Pirate Day is clearly intended as a parodic tradition and its
foundation is fitting to that. According to a 2003 edition of the Eugene Oregon Register
Guard, the idea for the day came during a 1995 racquetball game between two friends from Oregon,
John Bauer and Mark Summers. In a 2003 interview Bauer explained, “One of us must have strained
something and let out an Arrrgghh.” The two decided then and there that what the nation needed
was a Talk Like a Pirate Day.” The actual date of the game was June 6th, but in respect to the
anniversary of the D-Day Landings they decided to choose another date. The Register Guard explains,
“They picked September 19th because that's the birthday of Summer's ex-wife so he could remember
it.” The holiday was only observed privately among friends until the two sent an email to
nationally syndicated columnist and humorist Dave Berry who championed the holiday in a 2002 column.
For the record Molly Babble, a University of British Columbia assistant professor
of linguistics quoted in the 2013 edition of the Vancouver Sun argues that “Pirates
of the Golden Age most likely spoke with a British West country dialect.”
Not all of these types of awareness days are so light-hearted. For example September 19th is also
Global Aortic Dissection Awareness Day. Described by the website Patient Innovation as “the most
common life-threatening disorder affecting the aorta'' a group of 17 patients from Scandinavia
affected by the condition was formed on September 19th 2014, and a global initiative was started
by survivor Timo Soderland the following year. The awareness day works in conjunction with the
Thoracic Aortic Aneurysm and Dissection Awareness Month which has been recognized since 2005.
According to Patient Innovation, “If we can get our friends to get organized nationally over
the globe, we can start to work more structured together with scientists, researchers and medical
companies to find better solutions to prevent our illness, and to help the ones already ill.”
Awareness days are essentially marketing campaigns and today are intimately linked to social media.
The Aortic Dissection Charitable Trust suggests that you use the hashtag aortic dissection at
#AorticDisectCT. But such awareness days predate modern social media, for example,
Breast Cancer Awareness Month began in 1985 as a partnership between the American Cancer
Society and the pharmaceutical division of Imperial Chemical Industries and the
well-known pink ribbon has been used as a symbol since 1992, all long before the advent of Twitter.
The history of health awareness days tracks back to World Health Day, a constitution
for the World Health Organization was signed by the members of the United Nations in July 1946,
and was finally ratified on April 7th 1948. That year the W.H.O. held the First World Health
assembly which designated April 7th as World Health Day and the first observance was in 1950.
According to the World Health Organization, the day is celebrated annually and each year draws
attention to a specific Health topic of concern to people all over the world. W.H.O. then works with
governmental and non-governmental organizations to schedule regional and local events to draw
attention to the annual subject. In fact the origin may go back farther than the W.H.O.
to 14 International Sanitary Conferences held between 1851 and 1938, although their purpose
was to standardize international quarantine regulations, and they did not include public
information campaigns. Today health awareness days have become quite common. The 2015 study
published in the American General Public Health notes that “Health awareness initiatives are
a ubiquitous intervention strategy; nearly 200 health awareness days, weeks and months are on
the U.S national health observance's calendar, and more than 145 Awareness Day bills have been
introduced in Congress since 2005.” “The sheer number has led to questions about whether they can
be effective,” as a 2020 article on the website Social Media Explorer opines. “By having so many
days we have allowed awareness days to become just another day. They're around all the time and they
become meaningless. The outcome of promoting so many days is that you promote none at all.”
An example might be National Butterscotch Pudding Day. While the day seems to be ubiquitous across
the many web-based calendars that list awareness days, none seem to know where the date came from.
Dayfinders.com writes with limited knowledge about the origins of butterscotch pudding, even
less is known about the history of the National Butterscotch Pudding Day, we don't know when,
where and how it began. And National Day Finder writes simply that, “National Day Calendar
continues to research the history of this food holiday.” While there are numerous mentions of the
day that come up on a search of newspapers.com, the oldest newspaper story listing September 19th
as National Butterscotch Pudding Day seems to be in the food section of the Lancaster Pennsylvania
Sunday News in August 2000 and that column says nothing about the history of the celebration.
While Google search turns up plenty of mentions of the day, as well as recipes, it does not turn
up an actual history of when the day started, by whom or even an industry organization responsible.
Moreover, there seems to be scant evidence that the day has helped the reputation of the once
very popular dessert. Food critic John Wright complained in a 2019 edition of The Washington
Post that butterscotch pudding mixes have become difficult to find, noting that “I can't pinpoint
when exactly butterscotch was jackhammered off the Mount Rushmore of pudding flavors.
In the past few years I think. That is to say, for all the attention it gets in newspapers,
National Butterscotch Pudding Day seems to have been something of a bust.” In fact,
the reasoning behind the day itself is somewhat suspect as Social Media Explorer says. But it's
this mysterious willingness to celebrate something on any random day just because someone has said
to, that's interesting.” “For some, saying it's National Ice Cream Day is enough of a reason for
them to go out and buy ice cream. It echoes the sentiment, if they jumped off a cliff, would you?”
And in a way it kind of does. Just mentioning National Ice Cream Day
which is celebrated annually on the third Sunday in July and was
officially proclaimed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 who said that “Ice cream
was a nutritious and wholesome food.” makes me want to go get some ice cream.
But does National Ice Cream Day really work? According to a 2011 report by the United States
Department of Agriculture, the roughly 71 million gallons of ice cream sold in the United States in
July was only in the middle of the pack. In fact more ice cream was sold in March,
although that might be related to March 21st which is National Free Ice Cream Cone Day.
While July is National Ice Cream month, August is the month in which the most ice cream is sold.
And January is the second lowest selling ice cream month behind December, despite January
15th being National Strawberry Ice Cream Day. The website National Today, which lists its goal is to
gather all the special holidays and moments from around the world, lists 22 national days related
to ice cream. Oddly, while a 2020 yougov.com survey listed chocolate as America's favorite
ice cream flavor, National Today does not list a National Chocolate Ice Cream Day, while peach
ice cream didn't rank in the top 13 despite National Peach Ice Cream Day is on July 17th.
To put it bluntly, the statistical evidence seems to support the idea that the eating of ice cream
is unrelated to the proclamation of National Ice Cream Days. And yet for some reason we continue to
add even more of these unofficial holidays leading to the question why? And when did this all start.
A 2020 edition of Discover Magazine notes that if there's one thing that humans from
throughout history have in common, it's a love of celebration. The magazine was specifically
referencing a three-day Roman celebration held in February or March called Anthesteria,
or the Festival of New Wine. While the specific traditions of the festival are lost to history,
Discover notes that the festival is largely thought to have been “A drunken blur of wine
consumption.” “The festival was really a harvest festival” as Discover continues,
“The ancient festivals were raucous affairs boasting ample booze and a good reason to
get together with family and friends and enjoy the fruits of the year's harvests.”
Obviously harvest festivals continue in their own form today whether in a more literal sense
like Homowa celebrated in August by the Ga people of Ghana, or the more symbolic nature
of America's Thanksgiving holiday that, while not necessarily a drunken blur of wine consumption,
do represent a good reason to get together with family and friends and enjoy the fruits
of the year's harvests. While there might not be a clear direct link between Anthesteria and
National Ice Cream Day, it's easy to see how both represent a human desire for celebration.
And the ancient Roman celebration of Anthesteria gives some historical provenance to wine-based
holidays like, Open That Bottle Night, celebrated the last Saturday in February. The website Wine
Folly explains this particular holiday. “Have you been saving that perfect bottle of wine
just waiting for an excuse to crack it open? Well tonight's your night!” If that holiday was not
directly inspired by Anthesteria it certainly seems at least to be in the same spirit.
Many of the things we celebrate today were derived from ancient traditions. In fact the 1582 reform
by Pope Gregory XII called the Gregorian Calendar was established because inaccuracies in the Julian
calendar were causing the celebration of Easter to be off. The website medieval.net explains that
medieval celebrations revolved around feast days that had pagan origins and were based on Ancient
agricultural celebrations that marked when certain crops should be planted or harvested.
That is to say, one of the most basic reasons for calendars was to keep track of celebrations often
tied to harvests and thus feasts which might help explain our fascination with all these
commemoration days. Celebrations are also tied to culture and national history. Most countries
celebrate some version of a national day, with a 2013 edition of The Washington Post noting
with surprise that Britain and Denmark are among the few nations without a national day.
And many of the holidays that are listed on calendars like National
Today represent national histories. For example,
in addition to being National Talk Like a Pirate Day and National Butterscotch Pudding Day,
today is also a Chilean holiday, Day of the Glories of the Army which is part of Chile's
multi-day celebration of its independence and is commemorated with a military parade.
Such celebrations of National Heritage can actually be perplexing. For example Cinco
de Mayo is celebrated more vigorously in the United States than it is in Mexico,
and many Americans are surprised to find out that it does not represent Mexico's Independence
Day which is celebrated on September 16th. And while St Patrick's Day representing the patron
saint of Ireland is seen as the nation's national holiday, traditional celebrations in Ireland were
quite simple. Whereas in the US the day, which celebrates the 31 and a half million Americans of
Irish heritage is a much more raucous affair. More resembling Anthesteria's drunken blur.
And of course the excuses to get together with family and friends are also representative of
the sensibilities of the modern era, and show on some of the stranger celebrations on the calendar.
Harvest celebrations might have less meaning in today's automated and global world where only some
28 percent of the world's population, and just 10 percent of the US population are employed in
agriculture, but by contrast, more than a third of the US adult population describes themselves
as fans of Star Wars…which brings us to the day before Cinco de Mayo. Reader's Digest called May
the 4th, a play on the famous line “May the Force Be With You” half earnest celebration,
half shameless marketing bonanza. But according to a May 2019 issue of Newsweek the first published
example of catching that connection came from an unexpected place…the election of
Margaret Thatcher. The famous conservative took office as the first female prime minister of
the United Kingdom on May 4th 1979, two years after the release of the original Star Wars.
On the day she took office the Tory Party ran an ad in the London Evening News congratulating
Thatcher with the Star Wars derived, “May the fourth be with you Maggie. Congratulations!”
Regardless of whether you think The Iron Lady was a Jedi or a Sith, the idea stuck and so that grew
among the fan community. Starwars.com remarks, “Star Wars fans chose the day to hold themed
parties or host community events and gatherings; others simply used it as a time to revisit the
films.” The first official celebration of the day was at the Toronto Underground Cinema in 2001,
although the unofficial holiday didn't take off until it was embraced by Lucasfilm in 2011,
and now fans sometimes recognize a second Star Wars day with the Revenge of the Fifth.
Another unofficial holiday that represents changing culture is April 20th, or 420
celebrated by cannabis culture. Recognition of The counterculture holiday has grown in importance in
the US as more states have legalized the drug. There are multiple origin stories for how April
20th came to symbolize smoking marijuana. One story is that 420 refers to the California
legal criminal statute for marijuana use, or was a code used by police officers to refer to marijuana
smoking in progress, but there's no evidence that such a code 420 was ever used by police.
A second possibility is that the number 420 is a reference to a 1939 short story by famous science
fiction author H.P Lovecraft. In the Walls of Eryx, the protagonist is accidentally drugged
by a mirage plant on Venus and in the story he notices the effects wearing off at exactly 420.
But according to an appropriately dated April 20th 2020 edition of Vox, the number tracks back
to 1971 when a group of high school students from Marin County's San Rafael High School would meet
to smoke marijuana at 4:20 in the afternoon, a time when most after-school activities had ended.
One of the original group members Dave Reddicks became a roadie with the band The Grateful Dead,
and the group helped to popularize the idea of a celebration on April 20th.
A group of fans called Deadheads handed out flyers in January 1999 suggesting a celebration on April
20th and that is generally acknowledged to have been the start of the annual celebration that now
is often celebrated by sales at legal pot stores, and has also gained popularity internationally.
While the popularity of such celebrations galvanized various subcultures the sheer
number and dizzying array of unofficial days is stunning. According to the calendar on National
Today September 18th, yesterday was Chiropractic Founders Day, Global Company Culture Day, Hug a
Greeting Card Writer Day, Chilean Independence Day, International Equal Pay Day, International
Red Panda Day, Locate An Old Friend Day, National Cartonage Day celebrating the making of boxes,
National Colton Day celebrating anyone named Colton, National Day of Civic Hacking where
people with computer skills use their skills for good, National First Love Day where you
celebrate your first romantic encounter, National HIV AIDS and Aging Awareness Day raising awareness
for issues with treating aging Americans with HIV AIDS, National Report Kickback Fraud Day, National
Respect Day which encourages people to act more more respectfully towards others, National Purple
Bra Day raising awareness of breast cancer in Western Australia, Read An E-Book Day,
U.S Air Force Day celebrating the establishment of the United States Air Force in 1947,
Wife Appreciation Day, World Water Monitoring Day intended to raise awareness among civilians about
the importance of regularly monitoring their water sources, and of course, National Cheeseburger Day.
Again that was all just one day, on just one of the many calendars tracking such days, although
September 18th does seem to be a bit of an overachiever in terms of unofficial celebrations.
And some of the calendars list today is not just National Talk Like a Pirate Day but
National Meow like a Pirate Day, representing that important connection between pirates and cats.
“Meowarrrhhh.” But there are plenty of criticisms of these types of awareness
days. Some people complain that we've made so many that they become essentially meaningless,
others complain that awareness days are the laziest form of action. I mean
changing your profile picture because an awareness day? That's something that they call slacktivism.
Some studies question whether awareness days are effective although other charities have
suggested that they see increases in fundraising on awareness days, and have been able to move the
needle sometimes on some types of legislation. What seems clear though is that the trend is
going to continue. National Today even includes a link if you want to suggest new holidays,
as the ancient human need for celebration runs into the excesses of modern technology.
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the History Guy. Check out our community on
the historyguideguild.locals.com, our webpage at thehistoryguy.com,
and our merchandise at teespring.com, or book a special message from the History Guy on Cameo.
And if you'd like more episodes of forgotten history, all you have to do is subscribe.