National Puzzle Day (and the rest)
Today is National Puzzle Day! (At least, it is in the United States, where they have a surfeit of such things.) Why not mark the day by dusting of one of those jigsaws you’ve got stashed in the garage, or getting a free puzzle game for your iPhone/iPod/iPad, or, y’know, treating yourself to a copy of Army Of Zero?
But they do seem to have an awful lot of these days in the US, which started me wondering how something like this starts. What needs to happen before a day gets widely recognised as what is correctly called a “commemorative day”?
Well, sometimes you don’t need to do anything official. Some commemoratives, like National Puzzle Day or the more famous International Talk Like A Pirate Day have no “official” standing. One day, someone just had an interesting idea and somebody else heard about it and mentioned it to someone else, and before long it was adopted as a de facto National Day. It’s a lot easier to get support for an unofficial day like these nowadays, of course, because we’re all a lot more connected than we were even 10 years ago.
Greetings card companies take the blame for some of these days. Faced with a blank square on the calendar, they do love to create a special day to drum up some extra business. In practical terms, the existence of many of these special days can be seen as being due to an alliance between (a) the greetings card industry, (b) special interest groups looking for a bit of love and (c) the unlucky congressperson who doesn’t want to be dismissive of a particular under-appreciated demographic. (See Administrative Professionals’ Day and Grandparents Day).
To have a day officially recognised in the US requires an act of Congress. Typically the process begins with an interested person or interest group contacting their congressperson, and convincing them that a national day in favour of their particular cause would be a good idea. The congressperson then attempts to get it onto the agenda for debate in Congress itself. If they’re lucky, the day may become reality in a few years.
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that there are a lot of attempts to get particular people or ideas marked in this way. This, combined with the fact that, unlike other bills, commemorative days tend to get passed without much in the way of opposition, meant that in the 1980’s and 1990’s, 30% of ALL PUBLIC LAWS signed by the President were for commemoratives! There’s more on the subject at CNN’s site.
