A reason to celebrate

January is a rather dull month, after the excitement and glitter of the holidays. You may be tired of celebrating and glad of a break, but I think it is an excellent idea to remember that there is always some cause of celebration. A couple of years ago, I discovered a website which gives one or more "holidays" and their histories for every day of the year.  These are not your big national holidays, like Martin Luther King's birthday, coming up on the 20th. No, these are off-the-wall genuine festivals that someone has cared enough about to promote.  For example, January 20th is also Penguin Awareness Day.  It is followed on the 21st, by Squirrel Appreciation Day.  None of these days will get you a day off work or school but they all have roots in someone's or some group's obsession.

Before 2001, very few of these fun holidays existed. Now, there is actually a set procedure to create your own national holiday.  National Day Archives, LLC allows you to register a new National Day.  It's not cheap and it's not guaranteed that your idea will be approved, but it can be a great marketing or publicity move. In many cases, there is a real connection between the date of the celebration and the thing being celebrated.  For example, Macintosh Computer Day (January 24th) is the date that the first Macintosh computer was released, back in 1984.  Does anyone remember the ground-breaking Superbowl commercial that year introducing the Mac?

  I started picking holidays that appealed to me and promoting them on my website home page, initially, to fill a blank spot.  Sometimes, I pick something that relates to my business, like World Photo Day (August 19th, the date the French Government purchased the patent of the Daguerreotype process and made it widely available.)  Sometimes it's so crazy that I want to share it.  Hobbit day was September 22nd, when we were in New Zealand, where Lord of the Rings was filmed.  

I started to write a different blog about why I like January. One reason was that the holidays are over and it is a calm and boring month.  I couldn't get anywhere with it and it may just be because there's nothing calm and boring about January!  I mean, Squirrel Appreciation day!  What's so boring about that??