Each month we will give you a list of special happenings in the UK, USA, and other English-Speaking countries, some serious, some light-hearted, and others rather dark!
2: Plan Your Epitaph Day.
This follows the more widely and enthusiastically celebrated Day of the Dead, in which the near 68 million members of the US Hispanic community, believing that the souls of the deceased travel to Earth to visit their family and loved ones, celebrate through both traditional family customs and large-scale public events. Today’s celebration is a more deeply somber and reflective one, thinking about your life and choosing the right words to summarize it for eternity. Here’s one that might guide you:
Yet sometimes death takes us suddenly and our epitaphs are written for us. Here are two from the aptly named 19th century Western town of Tombstone, Arizona, Boot Hill cemetery:
Here lies George Johnson Here lies Lester Moore
Hanged by mistake 1882 Four slugs from a .44
He was right, we was wrong No less, no more
But we strung him up
And now he’s gone
Sue Rangell (derivative), Marc29th (original), CC BY-SA 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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4: Melbourne Cup
It’s a day of public drunkenness and bad behavior; conspicuous fashion and animal cruelty, not to mention reckless and excessive gambling. The annual Thoroughbred horse race is held in Melbourne, Australia, at the Flemington Racecourse. It is a 3200-metre race for three-year-olds and up. The event starts at 3:00 pm on the first Tuesday of November and is known as “the race that stops the nation.” Quite right, stops many well-dressed spectators dead drunk in the stands, as well as horses dead in their tracks. Excessive drinking and gambling have also led to a spike in wife & child abuse claims (due to lost bets?) on race day; as well, the Cup has recently suffered a spate of race time equine injuries—broken bones, heart attacks, and forced overexertion—leading to horses being euthanized at the track. All told, 151 horses died during the 2023-24 Australian race season.
Richard Riley, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
5: Guy Fawkes Night
It began as an anti-Catholic celebration after the 1605 failed attempt by Guy Fawkes and 13 other Catholic men to assassinate the King and The House of Lords at the opening of Parliament. The annual celebrations that followed across Britain were virulently anti-Catholic, raucous and violent, and included the traditional burning of effigies of the Catholic Pope and Fawkes in bonfires. Over the centuries, it has evolved into a general night of bonfires, fireworks, and sparklers, with families, friends, and communities. Fireworks are displayed by sports clubs, churches, and other organizations. Families will also set off fireworks in their back gardens and take part in bonfire night parties. What happened to Fawkes and his co-conspirators? They were variously tortured, dragged behind horses, shot, hanged, and quartered, their bodies put on display to warn others against treason! The Guy Fawkes mask, popularized in the film V for Vendetta, has become a symbol of protest, and the symbol for the online hacktivist group “Anonymous.”
5: National Redhead Day
It’s celebrated on this date every year by the 2% of the world’s “ginger” population who have naturally red hair. Red hair is more common and appears with greater frequency—up to 6 percent—among those of Northern European descent. Earlier cultures associated red hair with witchcraft, the devil, and, according to Spanish Inquisitors, with the stealing of fire from hell. In the 16th and 17th centuries, women who had red hair were often stigmatized as witches and as moral deviants; Hundreds of red-haired women were burned at the stake over centuries of witch trials. Fun Facts:
- The rarest eye color among redheads is blue
- Ireland has the greatest number of redheads; they are also commonly found in Scotland and places where people have Celtic ancestry.
- Redheads don’t go grey. Read hair will never turn grey; it simply fades to white via rose gold when the time comes.
- Redheads are more likely to be left-handed because red hair and left-handedness are both recessive traits (which tend to come in pairs).
- True or not, redheads are associated with having bad tempers.
- Famous redheads throughout history include Henry VIII, Vincent van Gogh, Leonardi da Vinci, Mary Queen of Scots, Vladimir Lenin, Mark Twain, Galileo Galilei, Saint Brigid, Winston Churchill, and, of course, Bill Burr.
Dpulitzer, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
9: National Tongue Twister Day
It’s on the second Sunday in November. It celebrates this alliterative sequencing of words that are both fun and challenging to say. Today is also a day to learn some new tongue twisters. Here are some classics:
- She sells seashells by the seashore.
- How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
- Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
- The sixth sick sheikh’s sixth sheep’s sick.
- Pad kid poured curd pulled cod.
The last one was actually invented by MIT investigators as the most difficult possible according to their research on the human brain and speech. For me, the one previous to it is much more difficult! Try them all! Say each 10 times consecutively!
13: Guinness World Record Day
It’s a day for breaking records. It celebrates the anniversary of the publication of the Guinness World Records book, of course, enabling them to sell even more copies. Ironically, this book of records encourages more ridiculous, anti-social, dangerous, and self-injurious behavior by people when totally sober than a half-dozen pints or more of the Black Stuff could ever do so.
- Most watches eaten: Kim Seung Do from Seoul ate 5 watches (no wristbands) in 1 hour and 34 minutes. He trains on 600 grams of metal a day and has consumed an estimated 4 tons in his lifetime. (Won’t be asking the obvious question.)
- Loudest burp: UK gent Paul Hunn burped at an ear splitting 109.9 decibels in 2009. (Equal to a power saw or jackhammer up close, and able to cause hearing damage with only short-term exposure.) In the women’s category, Italy’s sweetheart Elisa Cagnoni released a belch at a deafening 107.0 decibels. No information is given about what and how they train.
- Fastest to count to a million: Jeremy Harper counted from 1 to 1,000,000 in 89 days! (This record looks like low hanging fruit: all you need is a clean calendar for 3 months, an extremely high boredom threshold, and a pathetic hunger for a modicum of fame.)
It would seem that even the good folks at Guinness would agree that people’s quest for celebrity has gone off the rails of good sense and health. They have banned the following: gluttony records; being buried alive; dance marathons; overfeeding pets or farm animals; sleep deprivation; binge drinking; child-endangering records and many more.
26: Australian Thanksgiving
It’s celebrated on a different date from the American Thanksgiving—on the last Wednesday of November. It has little national significance and is chiefly celebrated on the territory of Norfolk Island, located nearly 1,000 miles east of the Australian mainland, with a population of around 2,400. The tradition was introduced in the late 1800s by Americans sailors from whaling ships. Interestingly, inhabitants of the island are descendants of the infamous mutineers of the HMS Bounty, 193 of them having moved from Pitcarin Island in 1856 to Norfolk, then an uninhabited former penal colony.
27: National Electric Guitar Day
Hendrix? Page? Jones? Clapton? B.B. King? Beck? May? What about Blackmore? Townshend? Berry? Knopfler? Gilmour? Electric Guitar Day takes place on the birthday of electric guitarist legend Jimi Hendrix. By the 1950s, the electric guitar had become one of the most widely used and important instruments in popular music. It became integral to the development of electric blues, rock and roll, rock, heavy metal, and punk rock. So, who’s the greatest ever? That’s quite subjective, like asking who’s the greatest author, what’s the best film, or even what’s the best men’s underwear. Many would reasonably say Hendrix, but for my money, London’s graffitied walls of the late 60s didn’t lie, stating: CLAPTON IS GOD. And before snooty guitar aficionados take issue, I’ve met you before: lying on your sofa in your orange TK Maxx skivvies, a framed B&W photo of Jimmy Page on the dirty bare wall behind, reading Tom Clancy novels or watching reruns of Twilight. Get outta here!
Carlos Delgado, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
27: American Thanksgiving Day
It’s considered a Day of Mourning for many present-day Native Americans. But, as taught to generations of American school children, it is historical celebration rooted in a harvest feast happily shared between English colonists and the Wampanoag people in 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts—so far, so good, but this meal marked but a brief respite from what were often tense and violent relations between the Native Americans and their colonizers, the latter offering up little more than land theft, disease, rape, slavery, and death to the local populace. The tradition of early colonizers giving thanks (never the locals) is equally tied to the horrific massacre of over 700 Pequot Indigenous men, women, and children a few years later by the soldiers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In recognition of this “victory,” Governor Winthrop proclaimed a “day of thanksgiving” for returning soldiers—all but two survived. Puritan zealots thereafter excused this genocidal annihilation of women, children, and the elderly with biblical scripture. Sound familiar? Anyway, enjoy your turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and pumpkin pie! And, go Cowboys!
28: Black Friday
It’s the Friday after Thanksgiving in the United States. It traditionally marks the start of the Christmas shopping season and is the busiest shopping day of the year in the US. Many stores offer highly promoted sales at heavily discounted prices and often open early, sometimes at midnight. Here are some fun facts about Black Friday:
- The original term was used to describe a financial panic & stock crash of 1869.
- Online sales now officially surpass in-store sales for the Black Friday event.
- An auto insurance company’s analysis show a 34% increase in accidents on Black Friday, most occurring in parking lots while hurriedly backing out of spaces.
- Over 39% of Black Friday sales are on Smartphones.
- The Black Friday tradition has spread to over 15 countries; at the same time, it has been banned in several others.
- 12% of buyers online admit to being drunk when making their purchases.
- In 2011, Walmart broke the Black Friday tradition by opening on Thanksgiving evening—thus, requiring employees to leave their family celebrations. Owned by the Walton family (total worth $432 billion—world’s richest family), Walmart was shamed into closing in 2020, “generously” allowing workers the full day off once again.
Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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