Are You Ready for National Whipped Cream Day?

January is here and here are a few dates for your diary: National Whipped Cream Day (Jan 5), National Winnie the Pooh Day (Jan 18), Clashing Clothes Day (Jan 23), Visit Your Local Quilt Shop Day (Jan 25) and National Bubble Wrap Day (Jan 27), to name just a few.

For reasons that remain unclear even to me, I spent a whole year trying to mark a different one of these weird and wonderful fake holidays. But where do they all come from? And can you start your own?

I was amazed to discover that there are now several thousand of these pseudo-holidays, most starting in the US but now spread far and wide across the internet. They range from the important (Religious Freedom Day) to the nakedly commercial (Ronald Reagan launched National Ice Cream Day in the 1980s to support the US dairy industry) to the quirky (Alien Abduction Day).

They seem to have begun in the US around the turn of the 20^th century. National Raisin Day was introduced by California raisin-growers in 1909, while Hallmark launched Friendship Day in 1919 in a subtle bid to sell more cards.  

But it’s the rise of social media that has really seen the Days explode. Websites like Days of the Year in the UK and National Day Calendar in the US feature 1000s of them (more, they say, than they can even count). For a fee, the latter will even proclaim and promote new Days it selects.

But in fact, anyone can start a Day. You simply need to think of a new idea (harder than it looks), build a bit of an audience, ideally get an endorsement or two. (Talk Like A Pirate Day peaked in 2012, when then-President Obama tweeted: ‘Arr you in?’) By the time your Day rolls round for its second year, Google will likely have picked it up and made it an established internet fact. 

How, then, should you actually observe a Day? ‘On National Chilli Day, people eat chilli,’ says Holly McGuire of Chase’s Calendar of Events, the Bible of fake holidays. ‘On Haiku Day, they read or write haikus.’ Perhaps the best way is just to dip into this mad unofficial calendar every now and then, and find an excuse for some fun.                                                                             

Dan Brotzel

Dan has three copies of his new novel, Thank You For The Days (Bloodhound Books), to give away. For a chance to win, simply send in your idea for a new fake holiday to competition@beachmediapublications.co.uk — the best three will win a copy.